Talk Talk Unable to access secure sites and email issues

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Hi all,

this is my first post. It might not be relevant to anyone in the US, but for those users (like me) in the UK, hopefully the information I have will help others.

My apologies if this solution has already been posted on this site.

Here goes, I have recently become acquainted with Macs, unfortunately, not my own, but troubleshooting someone else's.

The lady in question was unable to send emails on her Mac Book larger than a few words and was unable to send attachments (could receive them OK). Also, I discovered that any site requiring secure log in, such as Internet Banking would load to the point of bringing up the log on screen, but once log in details had been entered, no further progress could be made.

The lady has TalkTalk for her ISP and the solution was to access the router and change the MTU setting. TalkTalk requires an MTU setting of 1432. I accessed the router and its MTU settings under the WAN section of the router was set to zero, which uses default setting. Now, I would have expected that if it is set to use default that the default would be 1432 on a router provided by TalkTalk (Huawei EchoLife HG520b/s) as it is the MTU setting TalkTalk says is required and because I expected that to be the setting, I nearly didn't change it, but then decided to go for it anyway. I changed it to 1432 and then got a message on screen saying the TCP MSS setting which was set to1400 by default, would not work with the MTU setting of 1432 (I'm not technical enough to know why), so I changed that to zero (uses default) and bingo, the problem was solved. The lady can now write emails of any size and send attachments and access secure sites such as Internet Banking, something she has not been able to do since she first had her Mac Book and Broadband since around 18 months ago. I made sure to change her Airport setting to MTU 1432 as well.

One strange thing - and I am assuming that this is down to the differences between Windows OS and Mac OS, is that when I connected my laptop to the router before making the MTU changes, I did not have the same limitations on my Windows Vista laptop, I was able to access secure sites and access web mail, etc. via my laptop so I was surprised when changing the MTU settings resolved the issue on the Mac, because at that point, I thought the problem couldn't be to do with the MTU setting and was almost at the point of doing an Archive and Restore of the OS. I am glad I went with my instincts though and tried the MTU setting instead.
 

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