passwords vanish/reappear!

  • Thread starter Thread starter Chris Hewison
  • Start date Start date
C

Chris Hewison

I recently noticed a curious effect re. my outlook account passwords. All of
the (3) account passwords had mysteriously been forgotten by outlook. The
receive operations failed leaving the password dialog open and requiring a
new entry. The "remember" box was now un-ticked. I just cancelled them and
tried to investigate reasons (with little luck!). Approx one hour later,
another attempt to download email was completely successful and all the
passwords etc were back to normal.
I would be interested to know what's going on! Any suggestions?
Chris
 
The RFCs for POP3 suck. Only 2 statuses are returned for ALL
operations: +OK and -ERR. Your e-mail client can usually detect if a
connection succeeded to the mail server but there is usually an +OK
returned by the server. The e-mail client then tries to send USER and
PASS commands to log onto the mail server. If the login fails, the -ERR
code is returned. That doesn't tell the e-mail client diddly squat why
the login failed. Couldv'e been the mail server accepted the connection
but then the login process, daemon, page, or the target server to which
you get redirected in a server farm is not available on that port.
Could've been the mail server is actually down but still accepting
connections; i.e., it is unresponsive. Could be the login submit is
screwed up. And it could be the wrong username and password were sent.

Since the e-mail client has been given no clue as to the real cause for
the login failure, it has to guess. Outlook's guess is that the
username and/or password are wrong so it prompts you for them. Other
e-mail clients might just record or ignore the error and not present any
dialog and hope that the next mail poll will work, but then you don't
know there are login problems until you realize that you haven't
received any e-mails in a long time. The Outlook user doesn't know if
the stored username and/or password are wrong, or if they are not being
remembered (so they may needlessly apply a KB fix which requires a
registry edit), or if the login failed for a different reason.

I usually just kill the dialog box and let Outlook retry on the next
scheduled mail poll. It is a big pain to have to keep closing this
bogus prompt when the mail server is screwing up the login. It's not
that Outlook is flaky at remembering the username and password (well, it
has some problems). It's a problem that POP3 is so stupid as to merely
provide only binary "me good" and "me bad" statuses as if there was only
one cause of all failures. The string, if any, after the +OK and -ERR
statuses is whatever the mail admin or code writer wants it to say. It
is optional. It is non-standard. It is unusable to determine the
actual cause of the problem (unless the e-mail client actually presents
that text to the user so they might decipher what the mail server is
trying to report - but then the user becomes the error handler).
 
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