In reply to a post by yarwell:

Seems to be an inherent feature of BT Yahoo POP3 email to fail to connect, and the misleading Microsoft error message leads people to change passwords they can't remember and messing the whole thing up.

Yes, Live Mail is just the latest incarnation of the POP3/IMAP client that originally shipped with IE3.0 and was then called "Internet Mail and News". Most people know it as Outlook Express but its EXE name was then "MSIMN.EXE" - sadly no relation to the full "Outlook" product.

Its a silly lack of detail in the design bug, where any POP3 error message throws up the password dialog, even if the password is actually correct :-/

I use Thunderbird for POP3 access to several email accounts. Occasionally the login credentials for BT or Orange.net will fail for a while but start working again later. They've both been like that for as long as I can remember. It doesn't happen very often, but often enough that I've noticed. I can't remember what error message Thunderbird reports though.

Other accounts like Gmail and Lineone.net (now Talktalk) just seem to work without password problems.

Also I didn't notice until recently that BT has more than one POP3 server, or at least more than one name for the server. I was trying to enable connection security which never worked on pop3.btinternet.com and found mail.btinternet.com which does support POP3 with SSL/TLS security. It will be interesting to see whether this setup is more reliable.

Exactly! No big deal!

I can't remember the msg either, but thought it was just "Server not responding".

Orange also has at least 4 POP3 servers: pop.freeserve.net, pop.freeserve.co.uk, pop.wanadoo.co.uk, pop.orangehome.co.uk, all with diff IPs. Indeed I set my wife up with 3 OE a/c's with diff POP3 as this problem occurred more with her than myself, but now hasn't happened for ages.

I've had the odd Gmail fail through TBird, I usually just hit the Get Messages button, sometimes that works other times it fails, if latter usually a problem with the server rather than the Username/password.

In the old days both Firefox & Thunderbird DID lose passwords frequently, but haven't noticed it lately.

Why would it send the wrong password when it's a stored password ? Once it is set up, one never actually re-enters it. I don't type the password every time I go into Live Mail. And my PC hasn't lost or erased it, as I can see in the POP error window that there is a password there. What's more, typing in the password again makes no difference.

Lol......if it's a server problem, it is mighty strange how me changing my email password can 'fix' a remote sever problem ! I'd day Mulder and Scully would be interested !

Live Mail can give me a password error for an hour or more, yet the minute I do the process of changing the password ( which involves confirmation via BTYahoo web site ) it all works. Never once does the BTYahoo mail site say there is still a problem.

Maybe it has just failed to authenticate because something else has stopped working and the error message really means "try again later" ?

That doesn't explain why one can try again later and it still fails, yet the minute one changes the password ( or indeed reset it to the same password, which is what I do ) it all works fine.

The process of 'changing' it involves being forced to visit the BT Yahoo web site to 'confirm' the change.

I can understand the server simply not working. But I've never heard of changing one's password making a remote server start working.

Maybe your password is being entered wrongly by someone else, thereby locking your account?

if a database entry with your password in became corrupted, leading to read errors that broke the POP3 process, then resetting it to update the database entry would logically fix it.

Be interesting to try a POP3 login from telnet to see what the error messages are...

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/187785