Eric Stewart: Running Off At The Mouth

“can’t establish a reliable data connection to the server”

by Eric Stewart on Nov.10, 2010, under Cell Phones & Providers, Networking, Technology, The Internet

As an employee or faculty member at the university where I work, you have the option now to have your email hosted on either the university run Exchange servers, or you can use the (formerly strictly) student email system run by Google.

While investigating the pros and cons of moving my email from the Exchange server to the GMail system, I attempted to add my university GMail account as a second account to my Samsung Epic 4G would routinely return the error:

“Can’t establish a reliable data connection to the server”

This would happen using either 3G or WiFi.

First, I suggest you fire up your favorite IMAP application and make sure that you can log into your GMail through it.  I had some password issues that took a call to one of the Identity Management folks to figure out.  Depending on how your authentication is configured (and it could be a little funky), you’ll want to make sure you can log “directly” into GMail first, rather than through any other authentication system your school or workplace may have in place.

Once I got that worked out, I was still having the issue … so, one more try on Google …

What fixed it for me was what I found on the Droid X Forums via Google.  Essentially, you attempt to add/log into the account using your “second” GMail login information to the YouTube application.  When I did this, I got an HTTP 500 error in YouTube … but when I next fired up the GMail app, the account was added, though it claimed that it wasn’t set up to sync contacts and calendar data (oops – turns out you can only do one calendar at a time on Android 2.1, unless you know the trick).  Checked that setting and now things appear to be good to go.

A quick Google of the error message will show all sorts of possible solutions to this issue, one of which being to do a factory reset of the phone, which usually wipes all on-board data (meaning you’ll have a bit of a chore doing any restoration/customizing).  So, before going that route, you might want to try using the “Log in to YouTube” option to see if that fixes the issue.

:, , , ,

1 Trackback or Pingback for this entry

  • Adding a Google Account is not working. - Android Forums

    […] “can’t establish a reliable data connection to the server” – Eric Stewart: Running… and if you're still on 2.1: Android: Second GMail Account Calendar – Eric Stewart: Running Off At The Mouth __________________ Eric Stewart – http://ericdives.com/ For my Android experiences, see my Android related blog posts My current apps via AppBrain Treo 300 > Treo 650 > Blackberry 8703e > Blackberry 8830 > Blackberry 9630 > Palm Pre > Samsung Epic 4G […]

Hi! Did you get all the way down here and not find an answer to your question? The two preferred options for contacting me are:
  • Twitter: Just start your Twitter message with @BotFodder and I'll respond to it when I see it.
  • Reply to the post: Register (if you haven't already) on the site, submit your question as a comment to the blog post, and I'll reply as a comment.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.