About a year ago (maybe less) I decided to push all of my mail services for my family over to Google Apps.  My previous solution of running Squirrel Mail on a Linux server was just not cutting it.  It was stable, don’t get me wrong, but the features left much to be desired to say the least.  I did a little user survey within my domain (my mom, dad, brother, etc) and found they were just as dissatisfied with Squirrel as I was….so, off we were to Google.

I’ll cut to the chase now.  My dad, oddly enough, seems to be the largest user of email within my domain.  This past week, he went out of town.  While he was gone, he started having this issue where he wasn’t able to retrieve email on his iPhone.  When he got home, he was getting the same errors when using Apple Mail.  It was telling him that it could not connect to the IMAP server.  I attempted to log into his account through the web GUI and it was successful.

After a few days of searching around, I figured I’d give the Google Forum a search…and whaddya know…it worked.  I found that users were having to “unlock CAPTCHA”….what the heck is that?  I’d never done this.  I couldn’t find anywhere on the forum though that would tell me how to do this.  However, I did find someone who blogged about it…and so…I’m blogging it.

To unlock your Google Apps CAPTCHA, go to the following address (insert your domain obviously), put in your user information, insert the CAPTCHA shown and that should be it…it should then let you know that your CAPTCHA was unlocked.

https://www.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/UnlockCaptcha