by I recently had a problem with one of my mail accounts (and before you ask, no, it wasn’t Gmail under Mavericks). The issue was that the account, which is provided by Dreamhost, is located on a mail server named one thing (mail.doombot.com), but is secured with a certificate for a different mail server (mail.dreamhost.com). The result was that every time I opened Mail, I got an error saying that the two certificates didn’t match.
The easiest way to fix this type of issue is to edit a file on your drive called hosts, but it’s located in the hidden /private/etc folder. That’s where Lars van de Kerkhof’s free Hosts System Preferences pane comes in.
If you’re not familiar with the hosts file, it’s essentially a local override for the DNS (Domain Name Server) system. DNS is what takes nice, pretty website addresses (a.k.a., hostnames, such as macworld.com) and translates them into their hard-to-remember, IP-address equivalents (say, 70.42.185.230). The hosts file lets you override the DNS system for particular addresses or ranges of addresses. You just enter, in the text file, the necessary IP addresses and their corresponding hostnames.
If you’re handy with vi, emacs, or another shell-based text editor, you can edit the hosts file using Terminal, but most of us would rather avoid that approach. In addition, once you’ve made changes to the hosts file, you generally have to refresh OS X’s DNS cache before the new settings take effect, and that’s yet another under-the-hood process many Mac users won’t know how to do.
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