[G4] G4] A password screwup??

[Perry The Cynic]

--On Thursday, March 18, 2004 7:18 AM -0500 Donald Farnum <farnum at msu.edu> 
wrote:

> I, too have had occasional dialogue boxes pop up in Apple's "Mail"
> telling me my password was not accepted. This happens for all my ISP's
> occasionally, not just .Mac.  If I simply type in my current password in
> the dialogue box and hit "return" the problem goes away and Mail seems to
> remember it for awhile. I've simply attributed it to a corruption of the
> password in transmission and not worried about it since it happens
> infrequently and is easily dealt with. It has happened once more since I
> installed 10.3.3. (G4/800/DP)

Here's what's I think is happening. Some mail servers (particularly IMAP), 
when they are "shutting down" for maintenance etc., greet their clients 
with a return code essentially saying "you don't have the right to get at 
this mailbox (right now)." Most mail clients interpret this as "perhaps the 
password has changed" and prompt for a new password.

Now usually this happens in the middle of the night, so when you get back 
in the morning, you see the "enter your password" prompt, enter your (old, 
still valid) password, and it works (the server having finished its 
maintenance/reboot by then).

This isn't specific to Mail.app; I've seen it happen with other mail 
clients. It's really a function of how exactly the *server* behaves in this 
situation. The client doesn't have much of a choice - it could sit around 
for half an hour and retry the old password, but then it doesn't know 
you're not sitting in front of your computer waiting for new mail *right 
now*, does it, nor does it know that you *didn't* change your password...

Cheers
  -- perry

> Greetings from Don's Dingey Den
> On Mar 18, 2004, at 12:04 AM, Pastor Mac wrote:
>
> > On Wednesday, March 17, 2004, at 09:04  AM, Joe Ellis wrote:
> >
> >> Anyone else ever have a problem with their .Mac password?
> >
> > Yes, I have of late.  I've surmised it to be either rebooting a
> > particular server in the mail server cluster or a load balancing
> > problem or just a generic network hang.  Keep in mind .Mac email has
> > been abused by spammers which has not helped the outages.  Overall the
> > outages have lasted for me just a few minutes and its back again.
> > Pax,
> >
> > Pastor Mac
> > On OS X
>
>
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Perry The Cynic                                             perry at cynic.org
To a blind optimist, an optimistic realist must seem like an Accursed Cynic.
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