Password not recognised consecutively

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frayedknotarts
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Password not recognised consecutively

Tue Sep 23, 2008 2:19 pm

Mailwasher PRO 3.3.0 on WIN 98SE d/l Comcast webmail

I have a problem in that the password for the mail account at COMCAST is repeatedly not recognized by Mailwasher... yet after telling it OK in the splash box and closing all subsequent boxes, mail immediately downloads and will continue to do so for some period of time (set to check every 10 minutes). It can be right away, an hour or a day or two, but the "bad password" box will eventually show up again. Re-entering the password in the appropriate place in the splashbox does no good, nor does checking the "remember" box. :shock:

If it did it all the time, I'd just delete and reload programme, but it's so inconsistant I thought I'd check in here first. I'd not want to lose any settings and the spam lists.

Far too good a programme to just ditch it... have been using it for better than five years and couldn't be happier (most of the time!)

Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Vince Brennan (reg)
Philadelphia PA
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rusticdog
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Re: Password not recognised consecutively

Tue Sep 23, 2008 2:55 pm

In some situations email servers send errors back after MailWasher has sent the password, in this case we assume it's a bad password error, however that is not always the case. The errors don't come with machine readable reasons, meaning the only part of the error we can understand is -ERR

Probably the most common occurrence of this, is when people have somehow managed to add the same email account twice into MailWasher, so my first suggestion is to double check you don't have two email accounts setup the same. Check this first, if that isn't the case we can look at getting a log file put together and I can check it out.
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stan_qaz
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Re: Password not recognised consecutively

Tue Sep 23, 2008 3:19 pm

I get something similar on my Cox accounts, the best thing I have found is to click cancel and clear the pop-ups, wait a moment and do a maunal mail check which most often completes without error.

Same thing happens with Thunderbird and just doing a second check works there too.
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frayedknotarts
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Re: Password not recognised consecutively

Tue Sep 23, 2008 3:24 pm

Nope, only one instance of the account. So, in HELP, ABOUT I'v checked the box for logging extended errors and as soon as this happens a couple more times, I'll post to this again and you can tell me how to communicate that log to you or you can just tell me what you're looking for.

Lotsa fun on the ranch!

(Incidentally, if you're in NZ and a sailboat fan, there's a race heating up between WAIONE and NGATIRA soon! Both built NZ about 1904. If not in NZ, ignore this.))


STAN: Thanks for the input, but the weird thing is that after clearing the error boxes, mail d/l normally and may do so for a week until the next rash of error popups! I don;t even have to go back for a manual download. I think Mailwasher is just ticked off at me for not upgrading it!
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rusticdog
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Re: Password not recognised consecutively

Tue Sep 23, 2008 3:58 pm

frayedknotarts wrote:Nope, only one instance of the account. So, in HELP, ABOUT I'v checked the box for logging extended errors and as soon as this happens a couple more times, I'll post to this again and you can tell me how to communicate that log to you or you can just tell me what you're looking for.
OK great, once you start seeing the errors. Go to Help >> About >> open the folder to where MailWasher stores the data files>> Exit the program >> go back into the folder you opened earlier and email the mailwasherpro_debug.txt file. You can email it through to me at mw-beta*firetrust.com (replace the * with @)

From what I've read so far though, it would sound like a temporary issue with the mail server. But the debug file should confirm or deny that theory.

Cheers
rd
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frayedknotarts
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Re: Password not recognised consecutively

Tue Sep 23, 2008 4:29 pm

One can only hope, but this has been a recurring problem for at least six months if not longer. I just finally decided to take up arms against the slings and arrows of outrageous glitches in the ether. Such a good programme I can put up with glitches for, but this has just dragged on too long.

Of course, now we've to the traps out the game will become wary and not come to the bait. :roll:

Such is the way of the world.

(sighs) :lol:
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rusticdog
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Re: Password not recognised consecutively

Mon Sep 29, 2008 5:31 pm

OK I got your debug file Vince, unfortunately it looks like Logging was enabled after the errors began, so I don't see all the information I would have hoped for.

My suggestions based on the information I do see though :

Try setting the time between mail checks in MailWasher to 15 minutes. In some cases this can help as it doesn't burden the mail server so much, and if the server is especially busy, it can reduce the occurrence of this.

Try disabling your AVG email scanner. AVG is intercepting all communications between MailWasher and the email server, and in those cases any issues are outside of MailWashers control. Your PC will not be vulnerable to viruses, as realtime protection will still be running.
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rusticdog
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Re: Password not recognised consecutively

Mon Sep 29, 2008 6:28 pm

I forgot to add, keep logging enabled and next time it happens again, assuming it does, send another debug file. Hopefully that tells me more.
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tbenton
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Re: Password not recognised consecutively

Tue Sep 30, 2008 5:17 am

I have Comcast and have had the exact same problem with MW frequently giving me the 'bad password' box. Its very annoying and sometimes I get several MW id/password error windows and can't get out of them and have to shut MW down and start it again. I only have one MW and Comcast/Outllok id/pwd/ account and have not added the same one twice and no one uses my PC except me so this is very frustrating. I have had this happen a few times before but lately its all the time. I have not changed my MW or Comcast/Outlook pwd either. Today it was so bad that I went in and retyped my password and all was ok for about an hour and then it started again. I also rebooted but same thing happened. I can't help but think this a MW issue.

FYI...I am a long time user of MW and these forums but I had to register again to post this. My id and password fell out for some reason..very strange.

Terri
:cry:
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rusticdog
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Re: Password not recognised consecutively

Wed Oct 01, 2008 11:36 am

Crap posts have been removed.


With regards to the password issue, if MW gets sent an Error message back after sending the password, it assumes the password is bad. As has been mentioned above there are steps to take to get this checked out.
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frayedknotarts
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Re: Password not recognised consecutively

Wed Oct 01, 2008 2:31 pm

Thanks, Rusticdao. I've disabled the email scanner and reset the time for checking as suggested.

Wilco the debugs.

V
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frayedknotarts
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Re: Password not recognised consecutively

Tue Oct 07, 2008 1:20 pm

Well, email scanner disabled or enabled, still going on... just had a rash of 'em today so I'll email that file.

Rats.
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rusticdog
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Re: Password not recognised consecutively

Tue Oct 07, 2008 1:37 pm

frayedknotarts wrote:Well, email scanner disabled or enabled, still going on... just had a rash of 'em today so I'll email that file.

Rats.
Can you email the file again, the one you sent was the old file. When MW exits, is when it updates the file, so if you have exited MW since it should now be all OK to send, otherwise just close the program before sending

Cheers
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rusticdog
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Re: Password not recognised consecutively

Wed Oct 08, 2008 1:23 pm

I got the file you resent, and it confirms what I thought. I'll go through it, hopefully I make sense as I also have a cold, so am feeling slightly vacant.....well, more vacant than usual.

Here is the relevant section from the log file. We see date, time, version etc...
With the [Read] lines, that is information sent to MailWasher, the [Wrote] lines are commands MailWasher has replied with.
The first [Read] line also tells us that AVG is intercepting all communications. Not that this matters necessarily, but it's often worth noting.

Code: Select all

POP3 socket log for mail.comcast.net:110
========================================
07/10/2008 5:37:18 PM
Version 3.3.0 

Key: ¹CR(0x0D) ²LF(0x0A)  ¶ CR+LF(0x0D0A)

[ Read  ] +OK AVG POP3 Proxy Server 7.5.510/7.5.524 [270.7.6/1711]¶
[ Wrote ] USER <edited out>¶
[ Read  ] +OK¶
[ Wrote ] PASS <password not logged>
[ Read  ] -ERR [IN-USE] account busy (locked by another POP3 process)¶
[ Wrote ] QUIT¶
[  Log  ] Exception during ReadLine: Connection Closed Gracefully. (EIdConnClosedGracefully)
[  Log  ] Connection dropped prematurely, but session was finished.

So you can see here after MailWasher sends the password, the server is replying with

Code: Select all

[ Read  ] -ERR [IN-USE] account busy (locked by another POP3 process)¶
So it simply means that the account with ComCast isn't ready yet for another check. Now, it could be that your email program was recently downloading messages, however looking at your log files afterwards all your email were still showing in MailWasher, so I don't think that's the case.
Also in the log file on a few occasions you have previewed an email, beyond the 20 lines MailWasher initially fetches. When MailWasher checks (at least in your case) it is only fetching 20 lines per email, and if you want to view more of that email within MailWasher, it has to do another check to retrieve more of that message.

So I wonder if it's these checks, where MailWasher fetches more lines so you can read more of the email that could be triggering these [IN-USE] limitations. I hope that makes sense :)

Anyway, my suggestion now would be to go into MailWasher and tell it to grab more lines per message, that way, when you are reading your email in MailWasher, it will not have to logon so often to retrieve more of the message. To do this click Settings >> General Options >> you will see the Spam Throttle slider bar, drag this to the right, parhaps set it to download somewhere between 50-100 lines per emails.

My second thought, and given there seems to be more ComCast users lately complaining of the issue, is that the ComCast mail servers are probably working overtime, and in some cases are reacting slower to release email account locks, so they don't show as being in use. The reason I say that, is from looking at the relevant times in your log file that MailWasher was working, sometimes it failed 5 minutes after the most recent check, sometimes it worked even after three minutes from the last check. So there is no hard and fast rule ComCast have in place to say, don't check your account more than once per 5 minutes.
I don't believe it's AVG holding things up, as Googling for that specific error doesn't return the amount of results I would have expected to see if AVG was causing problems with accounts being checked too frequently.


So try the Spam Throttle, should that not work, spread the time between checks in MailWasher further, add another 5 minutes so there's 20 minutes between checks, and we can see where that gets us.

You probably also should disable logging now in Help >> About, the older version you have will just make bigger and bigger log files if it's left on, and we have the information we need, it is now a case of tweaking things so the errors occur less.


This sitaution is something we need to be more mindful of, and in future I would like to think we will be more careful before throwing up a 'Bad Password' error.

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