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Question

I have seen many posts/questions about this issue--but most of the "answers" i found for this problem were given in July 2012 which may be dated and are not working for me now.
According to Apple support, these are the steps to fix this problem:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3970?viewlocale=en_US
None of the resolutions have worked:
1. I'm not using a third-party firewall, just the Apple firewall and it's turned off.
2. I've checked my /private/etc/hosts file and there are no entries containing apple.com or verisign.com--only the default entries are listed.
3. I automatically set my date and time and have always had that feature checked.
4. I have one Apple ID associated with my email address and have confirmed that my Apple ID is verified.
Another discussion from someone who also couldn't fix it from the above resolutions suggested deleting/trashing info.plist file from apps folder. I don't have such a file in my apps folder.
Any other suggestions or help?!?! I've been using Facetime often on my Mac and it was working fine until about a week ago.

Answer 1

I've been trying to get an answer to this problem for MONTHS.  I upgraded both my iMac and my MacBook Pro to Mountain Lion, and ever since, FaceTime and iMessage stopped working.  I got the "Server encountered an error . . ." So, I called Apple "support" and they claimed they haven't heard of this issue.  I said I find it hard to believe since it's apparently a huge problem for tons of users and is all over the Apple forums.  After spending an hour on the phone with "support", they said they had to pass i on to a senior engineer and they'd call me back within 2 days with an answer.  After waiting a week, I decided to go to the place where I should have gone before, the place where all questions can be answered, even those too advanced for Apple, that place . . . YouTube.
Fixing the time issue didn't work for me, nor did any other solution that has been posted on the boards.  Yet after watching a 1:24 video on YouTube, both FaceTime and iMessage now work for me.
Here's the solution which WILL work.
You do need to first make sure your date/time settings are correct and set to adjust automatically.  But doing just this step will not fix the problem.
Open Finder, click on "Go" at the top menu, then select "Go To Folder"
Type in    /etc     and hit enter
You'll see a file called "hosts".  Drag that file to your desktop.
Right click on that file and open with Text Edit
Select all the text in that file, delete it and replace it with the text below, exactly as it is below.  Then save the new hosts file (just exiting will save it). And then drag that new hosts file back into the /etc folder to replace the old one.  After that, your FaceTime and iMessage will work, no thanks to Apple.
# Host Database
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting. Do not change this entry.
127.0.0.1 localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1 localhost
fe80::1%lo0 localhost