John Blessing wrote:
Patrick Keenan wrote:
Hello,
I'm using Outlook 2003 on a Vista Business system. I use it to
monitor four email accounts, one POP mail from my work, a gmail
account, and two POP accounts from my ISP (Bell), who contracted
their mail service to Microsoft some years ago.

The two non-ISP accounts work perfectly and are very reliable, but
intermittently, one or the other of the ISP accounts start rejecting
the username and password, which I know is correct. If I go to the
web mail interface and test the username and password - there's no
problem, unless the login server really, really is broken, which
seems to happen more than occasionally.

The practical problem is that I will be working away, with mail
running in the background, but suddenly "enter your password" dialog
appears, disrupting what I'm doing.

I'll enter the password or click OK, since I know it's correct, it
will be rejected, I will then click send/receive, and the server
will be polled with no problem. It may even pick up a piece of
mail, though I have been migrating away from those accounts due to
service unreliability.
Eventually, the problem will just go away for a couple of days, maybe
more, maybe less, with no change of settings on my systems.

The same problem happened on my previous XP system.

This is happening more and more often, and I'm wondering, before I
waste more time with the ISP's support staff, if there are any
suggested settings that might help with this kind of problem. I've
tried changing the server timeouts, but that seems to have no effect.

I also wonder if there is a way, as there is in Outlook Express and
Windows mail, to tell Outlook to just not include these account when
sending/receiving mail. If I could exclude those two accounts from
the regular mail check, that would be a reasonable workaround.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Patrick Keenan

I see the same behaviour intermittently. I have always assumed it is a ISP
server issue.

To exclude an account in the scheduled send/receive. Tools , Send/Receive,
Send/Receive settings, define Send/Receive groups, then select the group
that has a tick in the "Schedule a send/receive every x minutes" box, and
click the Edit button, select the unwanted accounts and tick the
include/send/receive boxes as required.

Thanks very much to the two of you. The groups change will provide the
workaround I need, until I can finally retire those accounts completely.

Thanks again.
Patrick Keenan