Moving an Older Version of Apple Mail to iCloud
Published at 20:05 on 2 July 2012
Apple recently discontinued its old Mobile Me service and replaced it with iCloud. If, like me, you’re not using OSX Lion, there’s no seamless way to change your Mail settings so that they will work on iCloud, even if you did go to the iCloud web page and say you wanted to keep reading mail from an older Mac system.
I did not find the Apple help page to be very helpful in this regard, so for the record, here’s the procedure I figured out to get Apple Mail working with iCloud:
- Do not delete your old account! It is not necessary.
- Under the “Mail” menu item, select “Preferences…”
- Select the “Accounts” tab, then select your Mobile Me account.
- In the “Description” field, edit the description so that the host name after the @ reads: imap.mail.me.com .
- In the “Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP) selection tool, select “Edit SMTP Server List…”. Set the SMTP server for your old Mobile Me account to smtp.mail.me.com . Ensure the “Use default ports (25, 465, 587)” radio button is checked. Also ensure the checkbox next to “Use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)” is checked.
- Click “OK” to save your changes and return to the accounts settings.
- Click on “Advanced”.
- Ensure the “Use SSL” checkbox is checked.
- Close the preferences window. Be sure to save your changes when asked.