Weird pop email problem - comcast with outlook

[JimD]

I have had comcast email for quite some time, and use Outlook on my PC to access both of my addresses at comcast. I setup my new iPhone to access these same 2 accounts, using the same username and password that has been used by my PC for many months.

Right after doing so I noticed that after the iPhone tries to fetch email it cuases my PC email to act weird. When the PC tries to get messages, it pops up a requester for the password of my email accounts. The requester is titled "Enter Network Password". The server, username and password are all already filled in, but the "save this password in your password list" is unchecked. This requester sits there waiting for me to click the "ok" button.

Has anyone else seen this sort of behavior, and do you know what causes it or how to eliminate it? I check the "save this password" box and hit OK and all seems well until the next time the iPhone tries to get mail from my comcast accounts.


Is it possible that two clients cannot share access to comcast email?

[meiphones_brill]

Originally Posted by JimD

I have had comcast email for quite some time, and use Outlook on my PC to access both of my addresses at comcast. I setup my new iPhone to access these same 2 accounts, using the same username and password that has been used by my PC for many months.

Right after doing so I noticed that after the iPhone tries to fetch email it cuases my PC email to act weird. When the PC tries to get messages, it pops up a requester for the password of my email accounts. The requester is titled "Enter Network Password". The server, username and password are all already filled in, but the "save this password in your password list" is unchecked. This requester sits there waiting for me to click the "ok" button.

Has anyone else seen this sort of behavior, and do you know what causes it or how to eliminate it? I check the "save this password" box and hit OK and all seems well until the next time the iPhone tries to get mail from my comcast accounts.


Is it possible that two clients cannot share access to comcast email?

Yes - pop3 can't cope with simultaneous access of the same mailbox. You can actually screw the mailbox up completely if you're unlucky. There's no work-around unfortunately. An ISP can tinker with the pop locking but you're unlikely to have any joy with a large ISP.

IMAP is a better solution if you can use it.

[KGMJr32]

I have issues sending but not receiving form Comcast account. I also am the only one accessing the account. Do a search on the internet...There may be something out there on it. Have you tried the Comcast website?

[JimD]

Originally Posted by KGMJr32

I have issues sending but not receiving form Comcast account. I also am the only one accessing the account. Do a search on the internet...There may be something out there on it. Have you tried the Comcast website?

Yes, I tried the comcast website. It showed how to setup the iPhone for access to my account, and the server address for outgoing mail was different from what was in the phone the first time I tried to access it. I changed this and the result was the same. My PC still sits there stupidly asking for the password it already has, until I click cancel - and then it goes and gets my email.

This sounds a bit like a problem discussed all over the web about Outlook 2002 and a corrupted password entry in the registry, but I don't understand how this would suddenly have developed after configuring an iPhone to access the same account. No changes were made to the PC.

[JimD]

Originally Posted by meiphones_brill

Yes - pop3 can't cope with simultaneous access of the same mailbox. You can actually screw the mailbox up completely if you're unlucky. There's no work-around unfortunately. An ISP can tinker with the pop locking but you're unlikely to have any joy with a large ISP.

IMAP is a better solution if you can use it.

This is my personal email - not my corporate email. There is no Exchange server involved, thus IMAP is not an option.

This is a POP email server (mail.comcast.net), and from what I've read there should be no issue with more than one client accessing the messages - so long as they don't delete the messages from the server after fetching them. I don't know about simultaneous access or any potential issue there, but the testing I was doing last night was sequential, possibly a minute or more apart.

[JimD]

Originally Posted by meiphones_brill

Yes - pop3 can't cope with simultaneous access of the same mailbox. You can actually screw the mailbox up completely if you're unlucky. There's no work-around unfortunately.

I examined an error message this morning from Outlook, and it said "Locked by another POP3 process". This lends credence to what you are saying, but I deleted the accounts from my iPhone last night - so why would there be a conflict this morning?

[meiphones_brill]

Originally Posted by JimD

I examined an error message this morning from Outlook, and it said "Locked by another POP3 process". This lends credence to what you are saying, but I deleted the accounts from my iPhone last night - so why would there be a conflict this morning?

Trust me - pop3 won't allow more than one concurrent connection without problems. It depends on the pop3 server, but what happens is the server will have a stale pop3 lock file that has to be flushed. Most pop3 servers set up a cron that runs every so often to clear these lock files out.

If you stop collecting mail on that account from ALL your computers for something between 25 minutes and 4 hours (depending on the isp's setting) then the cronjob will remove that lock file and you'll be running again.

[JimD]

Originally Posted by meiphones_brill

Trust me - pop3 won't allow more than one concurrent connection without problems. It depends on the pop3 server, but what happens is the server will have a stale pop3 lock file that has to be flushed. Most pop3 servers set up a cron that runs every so often to clear these lock files out.

If you stop collecting mail on that account from ALL your computers for something between 25 minutes and 4 hours (depending on the isp's setting) then the cronjob will remove that lock file and you'll be running again.

Only once have I seen the error that said that another POP3 process had locked things. Much more often what I see is what I described earlier - my PC keeps popping up this "Network password" request, and there are no errors to examine. The strange thing is that if I go to email accounts on this PC and press the "test settings" button it logs on to the server and everything is fine again - until the next time this box pops up.

[meiphones_brill]

That sounds about right. It is all down to the two machines overlapping. I have one customer who manages it reasonably well with one of his offices collecting mail on the hour and at the bottom of the hour, and the other collecting at a quarter past and a quarter to.

[JimD]

OK Here's an update. I deleted the "protected storage system provider" key from the registry of my PC, and re-entered the passwords for my email accounts into Outlook. This seems to have stemmed the tide of "Network Password" requests whenever Outlook accesses my Comcast email accounts.

I then created a new Comcast ID expressly for my iPhone, and only the iPhone accesses that mailbox; the PC never does so. I then configured my other two mailboxes to forward all messages to this third one. My iPhone is configured to fetch the contents from this mailbox every 15 minutes (best it can do with POP3 apparently).

I configured my wife's accounts the same way. I sent test messages to both her and my primary comcast accounts. Both our PCs and iPhones received the messages. Rube Goldberg would be proud.

I will use things this way for a while before I begin to experiment further.

I added thanks to you (me) :-) for your help with this.