My email isn't working

[moribundman]

Earthlink gives me six email accounts. I use two of them, my better half uses a third. For two days now, my two email accounts haven't been working. Yesterday I got a pop-up window that asked for the email account's password. I kind of didn't trust the prompt. I checked my earthlink account on the earthlink website and the proper password is already in there. A similar issue has occurred once or twice before, but always cleared up by itself after short while. I can't be without email for two days...

What could be the problem, Gridley? What's the suggested COA in a situation like this?

 

[klaymon]

They are having some network problems.

http://netstatus.earthlink.net/netstatus/netstatus.aspx

 

[moribundman]

My connection has intermittently not been working either. I want my money back.

PS: Thanks for pointing me to the network status page.

 

[brianl703]

I wonder if you've gotten a pop lock. That is a file created by the pop3 server whenever you access your email via pop3. It's purpose is to only allow one access to your email at time. It is supposed to be deleted by the server when you finish accessing your email, but sometimes if the connection isn't terminated properly, the pop lock file never gets deleted, and subsequent attempts to access email via pop will continue to fail until the pop lock is cleared.

Some mail clients will actually show the pop lock error response from the pop3 server, others are a bit stupid and simply ask the user for their password again, even though that isn't the problem.

You could test this yourself. In dos, type the following:

telnet (your pop server hostname) 110
user (your pop username) (hit enter)
pass (your pop password) (hit enter)

at this point it should say "ready" or "user has xxx messages" or something like that. If there's a problem it will give you an error message.

now type quit to close the connection.

You won't likely see anything you type after you connect to your pop server, but it is getting through to the server so just type carefully.

If you mess up on either the username or password it will tell you so. Just type quit to exit and start over.

 

[brianl703]

If you do get an error message (either about a pop lock or some other problem), call Earthlink support with it.

 

[moribundman]

Well, my email is still not working. According to earthlink there seem to be less known issues with the network today, but email outages are still listed.

When you talk about typing in dos, do you mean typing in the command line? Sorry, I have only a faint idea about using the command line. This is a Mac, so it may also work differently? I just don't know.

If my mail doesn't come back by tomorrow, I will call earthlink or try fidning out more about the pop lock. Thanks for the tips.

 

[brianl703]

If you're using a Mac, you can do the same thing with a telnet client..telnet to your pop server's hostname (pop.earthlink.net or mail.earthlink.net or something like that) on port 110, then enter the commands.

Windows has a built-in telnet client, I have no idea about the Mac, but I'm pretty sure you could find a telnet client for it in a couple minutes of google searching..

(At one of my previous jobs I was the Unix administrator that dialup support contacted to clear pop locks, among other things..)

 

[moribundman]

Today my email started working again -- without my doing.

 

[Papa Bear]

I thought my email had malfunctioned ..... but after a little investigation I found that it was just the fact that nobody wanted to talk to me.

 

[moribundman]

You don't even get those "From Russia with Love" emails that I get almost daily?