email outage and windows mail on vista

[#1]

i am running windows mail on vista.
i still am unable to acess my mail following the recent email  outage, although i can send mail. plusnet customer support double checked my settings, but said all the residual problems where people can't access email were with people running windows mail on vista. they claim the fault is with microsoft - they need to provide a fix (its a bit of a coincidence that the problem started at exactly the same time as the plusnet email problem).
plusnets's recommendation is to bin windows mail and run thunderbird instead, but i dont really want to do this. does this advice sound reasonable/sensible? might the problem get rectified, or have plusnet stopped investigating?

[#2]

I have also lost my e-mail and web mail. I am using Entourage on a mac.

[#3]

I haven't been able to access my email this evening.
Webmail reports the following:  ERROR: Connection dropped by IMAP server.
Using Thunderbird in Windows 7 reports the following:  Sending of password did not succeed. Mail server mail.force9.net responded: Temporary problem, please try again later

[#4]

[quote=lomond1965]i still am unable to acess my mail following the recent email  outage
I've checked your mail and can access all the mailboxes on your account. Have you tried recreating the profile in your mail client (remove it and add it again) ?

[quote=andrewgateway]I have also lost my e-mail and web mail. I am using Entourage on a mac.
I'm getting your account checked as I'm having some issues accessing your mailboxes.
[quote=pnf]I haven't been able to access my email this evening.
Interestingly your account name starts with the same 2 letters as andrewgateway's so I'm wondering if there is an issue with that TLK in the filesystem. I'm getting it looked at too.

[#5]

TLK = Two Letter Key
See http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,91668.msg766723.html#msg766723

[#6]

Chris
Thanks for yr suggestion . Before I do that, won't removing the account mean that i will lose all my old emails and the contents of my address book?

[#7]

You should be able to do that without losing any email. Do you use IMAP or POP3?

[#8]

@andrewgateway & @pnf
Should be fixed now, can you try again please.

[#9]

I use POP3.
On the laptop i am using, both me and my wife have a vista account, and we both use windows mail. my windows mail has the problem described above, but my wife can read all her incoming emails and can send email using windows mail.
i tried removing my account, and reinstating it (i didnt lose old email etc, as you said), but i still cannot access incoming mail and continue to get this error message:
"Account: 'mail.plus.net', Server: 'mail.plus.net', Protocol: POP3, Server Response: '-ERR Login failed.', Port: 110, Secure(SSL): No, Server Error: 0x800CCC90, Error Number: 0x800CCC92"

[#10]

It looks like you might have SSL enabled, you need to make sure it is set it for no encryption.

[#11]

i have looked but I don'at think i have SSL enabled. 
the settings are exactly the same (on the settings tab, and the bits about authentication and secure connection) as for my wife.

[#12]

Have you tried logging in to your mailbox using webmail? That would confirm you are using the correct login name and password.

[#13]

My e-mail is now working. But connection speed has gone so slow. It take a 1 min  to load this page.

[#14]

Yes, I can access mail via webmail (squirrel mail) using the same password and username  
but i dont want to use that as a replacement for windows mail as it it looks very clunky and doesnt seem to have that much functionality (eg you cant forward all incoming messages to another email address, such as a googlemail address.

[#15]

God forbid! I only suggested webmail as a test!