I use three IMAP accounts:
1 is hosted by my service provider and I access it via regular domain names.
I use this account to fetch all new emails, which I then either delete or move to archive accounts. The IMAP and SMTP settings for this account point to my service provider, but I don’t send emails from it.
2 archive accounts are hosted by me, and I access them either locally or via my own VPN. The IMAP settings for these accounts point to my local server and the SMTP settings point to my service provider.
Everything with this setup is working nicely so far; the only nuisance is the following:
When travelling, I mostly just use the first account, for which I don’t need the VPN. However, it only receives emails with the VPN activated. If I try without it, I have to activate VPN and restart the app. No error message is shown.
This mainly gets my attention when emails whose headers I received when still within reach of my local network do not load later.
This is specific to eM Client: AirMail and Apple Mail have no issues with this.
When travelling, I mostly just use the first account, for which I don’t need the VPN. However, it only receives emails with the VPN activated. If I try without it, I have to activate VPN and restart the app. No error message is shown.
If your mail account is not accessible without using a VPN, that normally means “your mailbox provider has a IP address restriction / block when outside the country”. Some mail servers do.
I used to have a local ISP mailbox in my country but could never access it overseas due to it was restricted. So ended up auto forwarding all my local ISP mail to Gmail to then access anywhere.
Now if your mailbox on your server “has no country IP address restriction / block”, then could be a eg: mail routing issue from yiur physical IP address at your location in the country your at. So I would then see if you can eg: ping or telnet to your mail server / mail box to see if you can reach it.
Also when you have this eM Client issue travelling (when no VPN is active), click the dropdown on the right of Refresh and then click “Show Operations” and look for any obvious error messages and paste them in this thread. We might then be able to see why you carn’t connect without the VPN.