Bug#502963: I've seen this TLS issue too

[Tim Cutts]

I've been experiencing this issue too, over the last couple of weeks.

Interestingly, only one of my two Macs is affected, and neither of the  
family iPhones, so I'm not sure it's definitely an exim bug - I think  
it may be a problem with Mail.app.

My suspicion fell on the certificate management in the Keychain.  I  
quit Mail, opened the Keychain Access application, and deleted  
anything I could find in the Mac account's keychain relating to my  
Debian mail server (its self-signed certificate, and any saved  
passwords).  I then tried Mail again, and *touch wood* I haven't seen  
any recurrence of the problem, but it's been less than 24 hours, and  
my wife -- who was the main affected user -- hasn't tried using her  
account much yet, so watch this space.

Another aspect of the issue, which you may wish to confirm in your  
case, is that Mail claims that the SMTP server is offline, even when  
it isn't.  This is still the case for me, even though the account can  
successfully send mail through my exim SMTP server.  So whatever Mail  
is doing to test the availability of the SMTP server clearly isn't  
quite working properly, although whether that's the fault of Mail.app  
or exim is unknown.  I suspect Mail, because Thunderbird on the Mac  
has no problem using my exim setup (you might want to confirm this  
yourself also)

For completeness of information, the client is currently running on  
Mac OS X 10.6.1, but I'm fairly certain Mac OS X Server 10.5.8, which  
I was running previously, was also affected.  The Mac that works fine  
is running Mac OS X 10.5.8 client edition.

Tim


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