Re: Outlook 2003 sporadically fails POP authentication

From: BillyBob (BillyBob_at_discussions.microsoft.com)
Date: 01/21/05 

Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 13:23:01 -0800

Jeff, Neo and Brian,

Again, thanks for continuing to give me suggestions.

John, my ISP's POP guru reviewed his log of yesterday's three consequtive
errors. No other party had access to or polled my account at that time. Yes,
John only sees the 5 asterisks where the password would otherwise be hence we
can tell nothing regarding dropped characters. Nothing like having a
small-town Minnesota ISP, huh?

Both of my computers are connected to a Netgear router with integral hub. I
switched the lines from the two computers at that point to eliminate the
possiblity of a bad port. Next, presuming the problem persists, I'll switch
the lines leading to the network adapters in the two computers. After that,
presuming the problem persists, I'll install my spare network adapter and
disable the one built into my motherboard. Presuming the problem persists,
is there anything I can do beyond that to prove my computer and LAN hardware?
 The router is common to both computers, of course, but the network adapter
built into my Intel Pentium 4 motherboard is configurable. Of course, that
was in place long before I upgraded from Office 2000 to Office 2003 and this
problem didn't occur prior to that upgrade. Also, this problem didn't arise
until after I installed an upgrade to Office 2003 but I don't recall which
upgrade. It was the "one before last" detected by the Office update routine.
 I see in System Information that Outlook 2003 has a COM add-in called
"Microsoft VBA..." whatever that might be.

"Jeff Stephenson [MSFT]" wrote:

> On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 20:31:04 -0800, BillyBob wrote:
>
> > Paranoid as this may sound, I'm wondering if someone else is polling my
> > account and colliding with me from time-to-time. I can't imagine why anyone
> > but homeland security would be interested in my boring mail, but I have no
> > other explanation.
>
> I know of several servers that lock the mailbox when delivering mail to it.
> Might that be a possibility? As to someone else polling your account,
> maybe you could try changing your password - if someone else had somehow
> got your password, a change would keep them from logging in. I suspect
> that government agencies have ways of monitoring our mail without actually
> logging in via POP3 (like direct inspection of the mailbox on the server,
> or sniffing the network traffic)...
>
> > I did experience such a collision once when I was logged into my POP account
> > through my ISP's web access and polled my account with Outlook. The message
> > I received was quite different from the failure to authenticate, however, and
> > clearly indicated a sharing violation.
>
> Yes, usually the message for this is something along the lines of "-ERR
> mailbox busy" or "-ERR mailbox locked".
>
> > I asked my ISP to go back to his logs to see someone from another IP address
> > has polled my account. This will be easy for him since my address is fixed.
> > Still, I have a feeling this is something I'll just have to live with.
>
> And ask if he can distinguish an authentication failure from a mailbox
> locked situation in his logs. That would remove the doubt around *what* is
> happening and leave us with the issue of *why*.
>
> Also, neo's and Brian's suggestions are worth following up.
>
> --
> Jeff Stephenson
> Outlook Development
> This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights
>

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