Repeated requests to sign on to POP3 email accounts (Outlook client)

[#1]

Assuming straws to clutch at are fair game. Have any of the email passwords been changed since they were first set up in Outlook 2016? I recall many years ago (not sure which email client) getting repeated requests to enter the password after I'd changed it. Put the new one in and it worked until the mail server connection was dropped. Then asked for password again.

I think what was happening was the the incorrect-password dialogue didn't put the value entered into the client store. So next cycle the stored password was incorrect again.

I think to fix that it was necessary to go through the "change account settings" dialogue completely, changing nothing apart from putting the new password into its field, then saving the new settings,

With a different client (older versions of Thunderbird) I've also deleted the old password from its store since I think Thunderbird asks for passwords on first use rather than them being entered during set-up.

[#2]

I have seen similar too.

At this stage straws are all that are left. 

[#3]

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@Townman wrote:
Daft question - is the ‘remember password’ box ticked?

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That's not actually daft, and I welcome any questions that may be relevant to finding a solution.

No, it's not ticked, but have never ticked it in all the years I have used Outlook.  The request to sign on should, however, only be made once (for each account) by Outlook during a whole Outlook session.  I type in my password once for each email account defined to the profile, and that's it - or at least it used to be.  For no apparent reason, in the last week of September, it just started redisplaying every tome a Receive request occurs, and won't b*****-well stop.

I'm not entirely sure why that tick-box is there.  I wouldn't want my password remembered across a closure of the relevant email account session anyway.  Sounds a security risk to me.  I never have my computer remember passwords. Outlook has always kept you logged on to each POP3 account for the duration of the Outlook session.  Now, since late last September, it appears not to do so.

Incidentally, as well as leaving the 'remember password' box unticked, I have always left the password field blank in the account definition, because I expect to type it in when signing on to the account.

It would be diabolical if my tiny friends, or indeed anyone gaining access to my computer and starting up Outlook, could simply read my emails and send out ones in my name, which is why I have always done things this way.

[#4]

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@spraxyt wrote:

Assuming straws to clutch at are fair game. Have any of the email passwords been changed since they were first set up in Outlook 2016? I recall many years ago (not sure which email client) getting repeated requests to enter the password after I'd changed it. Put the new one in and it worked until the mail server connection was dropped. Then asked for password again.

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Any suggestions always appreciated.

The passwords in the email account definition are blank, ad have never changed.  See previous email.

[#5]

I think you’ve cracked it, or at least found a question to ask Microsoft.

Has outlook changed it’s connectivity model or caching of the password?

I have two ideas in play here

- Does Outlook open a server connnection once and keep it live so long as the program is active? This model is arguably unsocial using limited server resources which are idle much of the time.
- If Outlook creates a session with the server on each send / receive cycle and previously (given the password is not stored or remembered within the settings) the password was NOT requested on each reconnect then it must have been cached within Outlook

I hope that makes sense. This does look like a change in Outlook functionality.

[#6]

Thanks. I do have it on the go with Microsoft Support (at least in theory, though they have gone quiet for two months) and I also have the redoubtable 'MVP' Karl Timmermans from the MS Community helping me.

It happened on both our PCs simultaneously, and I'm sure it represents a change in Microsoft behaviour.

Similarly and more recently,a recent change in behaviour at the Microsoft end evidently fell foul of the DNS IP address spoofing thing in the PlusNet router, as we've discussed in my "throttling" thread.

In a way, and in case you need a laugh, the fact a sign-on request is now being made on each Receive cycle is a blessing in disguise at the moment.  I have another Outlook problem outstanding since I first went on to Outlook 2016 in 2016, which is that it keeps downloading emails from the POP3 server that it has downloaded previously.  If I leave Outlook running with 'scheduled send/receive' set ON, then it can result in many duplicate copies being created, so at least this is halting that for the time being.  (I have set it to OFF, but several times in testing I have put it back on and forgotten to reverse it again.)

More and more, I see what I can only interpret as MS developer and tester attention falling away from the areas that deal with older ways of doing things, no doubt because they are concentrating on the new facilities like Cloud and business product integration, b***dy social networking and the like. Outlook 2016 seems to be riddled with bugs. To dinosaur types like me, even the help texts confuse, because they don't apply to working scenarios like mine.  For example, I spent ages looking at the following before realising they were talking about a Microsoft account, which is something I never use in conjunction with email account authentication in Outlook, because I am not using any of the new-fangled facilities.

"Sign out of email

In Outlook, it’s no longer possible to sign out of your account or be prompted for a password to sign in. Therefore, if you share your computer with others, you might want to prevent them from accessing your email account while they use your computer...."

Anyway, this isn't really the right forum for dealing with my MS woes.  I appreciate your and David's assistance, though.

[#7]

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@Townman wrote:
...
- Does Outlook open a server connnection once and keep it live so long as the program is active? This model is arguably unsocial using limited server resources which are idle much of the time.
- If Outlook creates a session with the server on each send / receive cycle and previously (given the password is not stored or remembered within the settings) the password was NOT requested on each reconnect then it must have been cached within Outlook

I hope that makes sense. This does look like a change in Outlook functionality.

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[#8]

Premature emission there.

I meant:

That makes perfect sense.  II would guess that your second scenario is correct, and that Outlook has changed/dropped its caching of the password entered.  The first idea would as you say be an unjustifiable resource-hogger, and I can't believe MS would have done that. Surely not...

[#9]

Are you able to (temporarily) set one account to save its password to see if the repeated login requests vanish for that account?

[#10]

I almost went to bed then.

Yes, but then of course it doesn't invite me to enter a password, because it already has it.  I have tried it just now.  I don't want to work that way, because it subverts email security. Start Outlook and you're away into my email accounts with no further ado.

That's one of the things that annoys me about my Android phone email app. You cannot set it up without giving a password for each email account.  I'd rather enter it every time I start the app, and be able to make it forget it when I shut it down.

[#11]

I have this nagging feeling that MS are going eventually to say to me that what they have done is correct an error. i.e. I have been using functionality that was never meant to work that way.  This was something I wrote to users on a number of occasions myself when I was a developer and problem-solder.  Aaargh.

[#12]

solver (or soldier if you prefer)

[#13]

It would be probably better to have an app password lock on your email client. So if you have to save the email login into the program it will be 'protected' by the lock.
There are some android email apps that have this as an option and I know that thunderbird has a "master" password to unlock (per session) all the stored email passwords.

[#14]

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@RPMozley wrote:
It would be probably better to have an app password lock on your email client. So if you have to save the email login into the program it will be 'protected' by the lock.

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It might be, but I don't quite understand how this would work or what lock product I might use with Outlook.  What Outlook designers have obviously conceived since day 1 is that you store your password in the email account definition(s) in your email profile, so you don't need to sign in yourself.  You then presumably get prompted to sign in only if the password is incorrect (e.g. if it has changed). [Thinks (fuzzily): I'll try using a dummy one to see if that creates a workaround.]

A partial solution which I have just come across is to place password protection on the local PST file instead, which will obviously endure the whole Outlook session.  See https://www.msoutlook.info/question/password-protect-outlook-startup

The danger with that is that you have a problem when you want to open an archived PST ifyou forget what password you assigned to it,  

[#15]

Hi Tony,

May we now safely conclude that this is not a Plusnet email (or network) service issue?