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My residential ISP (Bell Sympatico) used to host customer e-mail
accounts on it's own servers some years ago. Since that time, it has
been on a campaign to migrate customers over to hotmail's web-based
email service (while still maintaining .sympatico.ca addresses).

For those that still pull pop3 mail from Sympatico's server
(pop1.sympatico.ca), Bell employs some sort of proxy translation which
routes the pop3 login requests to the appropriate hotmail server
(pophm.sympatico.ca I believe).

This proxy transaction has suffered bouts of sporadic, transient
failures for the past year or two. I happen to use Outlook 2000 as my
mail client, configured to check several pop3 accounts every few minutes
(5 to 10 minutes typically). When a pop3 login failure occurs, outlook
will throw up a login window showing user name, password, and a
"remember password" checkbox. The user name and password is always
filled in, but to dismiss the window I have to restore the check in the
"remember password" box and then hit OK. The login window then goes
away, and because it does not immediately come back I presume the login
happened correctly without issue. This will happen several times per
hour while outlook is running.

I'm assuming that Sympatico is either causing the intermittent failure
of the login process, or they are willfully not investigating and
correcting it. I'm speculating that their motivation is to force the
relatively few remaining people still using pop1.sympatico.ca to migrate
directly to the hotmail product so they can shut down their
popx.sympatico.ca servers and essentially remove themselves from the
obligation of provisioning e-mail service for their residential
customers. This irritating behavior of the pop3 login failure would
help to accomplish that goal.

Hence my question here, which is how can I set outlook to NOT prompt me
with a login window when a pop3 login failure occurs, but instead have
it simply ignore the incident and retry it on it's own, automatically,
without needing assistance from me.

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Outlook Guy wrote:

> My residential ISP (Bell Sympatico) used to host customer e-mail
> accounts on it's own servers some years ago. Since that time, it has
> been on a campaign to migrate customers over to hotmail's web-based
> email service (while still maintaining .sympatico.ca addresses).
>
> For those that still pull pop3 mail from Sympatico's server
> (pop1.sympatico.ca), Bell employs some sort of proxy translation which
> routes the pop3 login requests to the appropriate hotmail server
> (pophm.sympatico.ca I believe).
>
> This proxy transaction has suffered bouts of sporadic, transient
> failures for the past year or two. I happen to use Outlook 2000 as my
> mail client, configured to check several pop3 accounts every few minutes
> (5 to 10 minutes typically). When a pop3 login failure occurs, outlook
> will throw up a login window showing user name, password, and a
> "remember password" checkbox. The user name and password is always
> filled in, but to dismiss the window I have to restore the check in the
> "remember password" box and then hit OK. The login window then goes
> away, and because it does not immediately come back I presume the login
> happened correctly without issue. This will happen several times per
> hour while outlook is running.
>
> I'm assuming that Sympatico is either causing the intermittent failure
> of the login process, or they are willfully not investigating and
> correcting it. I'm speculating that their motivation is to force the
> relatively few remaining people still using pop1.sympatico.ca to migrate
> directly to the hotmail product so they can shut down their
> popx.sympatico.ca servers and essentially remove themselves from the
> obligation of provisioning e-mail service for their residential
> customers. This irritating behavior of the pop3 login failure would
> help to accomplish that goal.
>
> Hence my question here, which is how can I set outlook to NOT prompt me
> with a login window when a pop3 login failure occurs, but instead have
> it simply ignore the incident and retry it on it's own, automatically,
> without needing assistance from me.

POP only has 2 status codes: +OK and -ERR. There may be a text comment
appended to the error issued by the server in response to a command from
the client but they are not standard strings so no e-mail client can
decipher those strings. The client only sees +OK or -ERR to the result
of the command it issues.

If while trying to establish a mail session the client gets back an -ERR
status, it has to GUESS what went wrong. Typically the client has to
assume the login failed because the login credentials were incorrect.
That's why you see the popup asking for you to retry the login. The
mail server may have too busy to accept the connection, or got screwed
up and abandoned the attempted mail session, or had a momentary problem
accessing a customer database to verify the login credentials, or
who-knows-what-the-server-did. The client only knows that while trying
to establish a mail session that an -ERR status got returned. Well,
-ERR doesn't specify squat of what happened up on the server. After 30
years, you would've thought the RFCs would been updated to provide a
fixed and defined list of comment strings that would help the e-mail
client figure out what went wrong instead of having to guess.

There is no option in Outlook to stop it from nuisancing you with those
prompts. The are mostly worthless. If you are polling your e-mail
account every 10 minutes and leave it running 24x7, that means it
performs 144 times per day. Well, yeah, so what if you miss a poll or
two or three in a row. You don't care but Outlook doesn't know that
(nothing to configure that it ignores the error). That Outlook keeps
bitching when there is a login problem (which has nothing to do with
using the wrong login credentials) is a nuisance. Because of this, some
users will rely on a 3rd party e-mail monitor to tell them where there
are new messages. That notifies them without leaving Outlook loaded
which will eventually start bitching about the login errors (and
guessing the credentials were wrong). Some, like MagicMailMonitor and
PopTray, even let you define rules so you can use some of those defined
in Outlook in the e-mail monitor, like deleting spam from the server,
color-coding suspect messages, and so on but they are their own e-mail
client and can't go moving messages to different folders inside of
Outlook. Still, the 3rd party mail monitors don't have a problem with
ignoring failed login attempts since obviously there will yet more polls
in the near future.

If you leave Outlook loaded continuously, you will see it popup an
occasional prompt saying the login failed and present you with a login
form. If there is a problem with the mail server at the time, you can
be stuck repeatedly answering this prompt until your pet has long
starved to death waiting for you to leave your computer. It is a
stupidity in Outlook that you cannot configure it to ignore failed login
attempts (and just keep on polling since it'll start working later), or
some number of allowed failures before it bitches. It is also a
stupidity that the authors of the POP e-mail protocol were so short-
sighted that they couldn't have come up with standard strings that EVERY
e-mail client could use to decipher just what an -ERR status means.

Read http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1939.txt. Just 2 statuses: +OK
and -ERR. The comment string is whatever the e-mail software author
chose or possibly modified by the e-mail provider using that software.
Can't use it for deciphering the cause of an error. The assumption is
that the e-mail client will show the error message, including the
comment string, so the user might have an idea of what caused the error.
That doesn't happen in Outlook when it shows the login prompt for the
login error.

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VanguardLH wrote:

> > When a pop3 login failure occurs, outlook will throw up a login
> > window showing user name, password, and a "remember password"
> > checkbox. The user name and password is always filled in, but
> > to dismiss the window I have to restore the check in the
> > "remember password" box and then hit OK. The login window then
> > goes away, and because it does not immediately come back I presume
> > the login happened correctly without issue. This will happen
> > several times per hour while outlook is running.
> >
> > Hence my question here, which is how can I set outlook to NOT
> > prompt me with a login window when a pop3 login failure occurs,
> > but instead have it simply ignore the incident and retry it on
> > it's own, automatically, without needing assistance from me.
>
> POP only has 2 status codes: +OK and -ERR. There may be a text
> comment appended to the error issued by the server in response
> to a command from the client but they are not standard strings
> so no e-mail client can decipher those strings. The client only
> sees +OK or -ERR to the result of the command it issues.

I've enabled smtp logging in outlook 2000 (which required the creation
of a new registry key).

This is an example of what is happening during one of these failed login
events:

Microsoft Internet Messaging API 5.00.2919.6600
POP3 Log started at 06/11/2009 10:01:38

POP3: 10:01:45 [db] Connecting to 'pop1.sympatico.ca' on port 110.
POP3: 10:01:45 [rx] +OK InterMail POP3 server ready.
POP3: 10:01:45 [tx] USER b1xxxxxx
POP3: 10:01:45 [rx] +OK please send PASS command
POP3: 10:01:45 [tx] PASS ********
POP3: 10:01:46 [rx] -ERR mail storage services unavailable, wait a
few minutes and try again.
POP3: 10:01:46 [db] Connection to 'pop1.sympatico.ca' closed.
POP3: 10:01:48 [db] Connecting to 'pop1.sympatico.ca' on port 110.
POP3: 10:01:48 [rx] +OK InterMail POP3 server ready.
POP3: 10:01:48 [tx] USER b1xxxxxx
POP3: 10:01:48 [rx] +OK please send PASS command
POP3: 10:01:48 [tx] PASS ********
POP3: 10:01:48 [rx] +OK mailbox has 0 messages
POP3: 10:01:48 [tx] STAT
POP3: 10:01:48 [rx] +OK 0 0
POP3: 10:01:48 [tx] QUIT
POP3: 10:01:48 [rx] +OK mailbox unchanged, POP3 server signing off
POP3: 10:01:48 [db] Connection to 'pop1.sympatico.ca' closed.

I suppose that if there was some way to have Outlook trap or look for
"ERR mail storage services unavailable" and in that case have it
immediately try the login again without prompting me, that would be
ideal.

Otherwise, is there a pop3 proxy I can install that will do this (and
nothing else) for me? And where outlook would then perform a pop3 login
into the proxy? I guess it would sort of be like a local pop3 server
for outlook?