I am not a fan of gadgets released by Apple such as iPhone, iPad, iPod and etc but the irony of it is I bought an iPad for my wife as a present for the last Christmas. There are times when she had to be with our baby and there’s nothing to do, so an iPad allows her to easily and conveniently surf the web (or actually to just log in to Facebook…). The first thing I did when I got it was to install iTunes and update the iPad to the latest iOS 4.2.1.

Then I went ahead and set up the Wi-Fi followed by her email from her custom domain. It seemed pretty easy setting up the email by just clicking on the Settings icon, then click on Mail, Contacts, Calendars and finally click on Add Account… iPad supports Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft Exchange, mobileme and Other. For custom domain we would have to set it up from Other by entering the POP Account Information with Incoming and Outgoing Mail Server details. I know the SMTP and POP details by hard because they are normally easy to remember, for example, “mail.raymond.cc” for both SMTP and POP. For some weird reason I kept on getting the looping error of “Cannot Connect Using SSL” Do you want to try setting up the account without SSL?

If I click Yes, it says Verifying and ends up showing me the same error. If I click No, it brings me back to the window where I can set the email account information. I tried to login via mail2web.com and there’s no problem which means the mail details that I entered is correct.


I remembered that I did help a friend with this same problem on his iPad but somehow managed to force iPad to accept the settings. This only happened after he upgraded to the latest iOS 4.2.1. Couldn’t remember how I did it last time but as far as I know iPad was never successful in verifying the email account.

By right if you click the No button on the Cannot Connect Using SSL error and then click the Save button again, your iPad will ask you if you want to save the mail account. If you don’t get it, then please follow the workaround below.

The workaround is to disable all network connections by turning ON the Airplane Mode and also making sure that the Wi-Fi is turned off. You can find both of this in the Settings icon. When you try to add an Other mail account with no network connections, you will get an error prompt that says “The POP server “mail.yourserver.com” is not responding. Check your network connection and that you entered the correct information in the “Incoming Mail Server” field”. Click OK and then click the Save button on the top right again. This time you will get a message saying “This account may not be able to send or receive emails. Are you sure you want to save?” Click the Save button and the “Other” mail account is added.

This looping problem seems to be intermittent but the verifying of Other email account is definitely a problem.