adding email to iphone unable to connect to server

(This seems like it's an Mail App issue). It likely won't find it and give you a New Account page with mostly incorrect information you need to change.

Description: AT&T (or whatever, this only appears in your app).

Enter your user information (in the example I use John Smith).

Go to Settings > Mail > Accounts > Add Account > Other.

Here are the steps I have been able to do on 5 different iOS devices: Or change to a currently accepted password, but I found the Secure Mail Key the reliable option. So I did it again with a Secure Mail Key for the account and used that for the password. Even doing everything else right as stated above, it wouldn't work. It has a 6 character password that was set up in 2007 before 8 characters was required. I had an old email address I use for sales responses.

This is just a guess but I think some simple, grandfathered passwords will be rejected by the mailserver, again due to the security upgrade.

So save some agita and go straight to Other when using Settings > Mail > Accounts > Add Account. A quick Google search shows lots of others can't either. It results in an endless loop of returning to the login page then the change password page.

Even if you change your password, don't bother. I end up in a loop where I enter my username, then go to an old AT&T Secure Login for a username and password, then end up on a Change Password screen. I believe it's related to AT&T's email security upgrade. But I can't do it now, and I tried on multiple iOS devices (3 iPhones and 2 iPads) in March 2021. If you can do that, great, it's much easier.

The AT&T Help Desk recommends this first.

At one time I could select Yahoo when configuring a new att.net mailbox on iPhone Mail.

How To Set Up Email on a Wireless Device is a link to the AT&T Help Page explaining how to set up Smartphones. Once I solved these issues, following the steps laid out by AT&T works. In the iPhone the default username will show up as jsmith, even though on the New Account screen has the full username entered, such as It will also come up with inbound and outbound addresses which aren't correct. Therefore, when using IMAP or POP 3, the entire username must be entered, i.e.

Example: AT&T consumer email is but the same mailserver also handles 11 other email domains, such as and There can be multiple unique jsmith email accounts to the same mailserver.

But AT&T mailservers direct multiple domains to common att.net mailservers. This doesn't matter for most mailservers as they're dedicated to a single domain name (i.e. After hours of troubleshooting and no resolution from either AT&T or Apple (they did try to help, especially Apple), I discovered the problem on my own: When the iPhone reproduces the Username in the manually entered Mail App, it only has the username before the sign.

Adding email to iphone unable to connect to server