User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 Firebird/0.7 Build Identifier: .3 milestone If there is a POP error, TB gives you a pop-up box asking for your POP password. This whole time it will not download any messages, thus a minor network or server error means that the app will no longer download messages until someone sits at the console and types in the new password with the 'save' option. It should try again without asking using the current password even while the pop-up box exists. Or a generic "failed to get mail" message will do. The app assumes the password is wrong. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.

This is not POP-specific. Same thing happens with IMAP servers. The actual behaviour looks more like this - if there's login failure (trouble at the server, mailbox locked, etc), Thunderbird ignores the saved password and forces password reentry, instead of alerting to a problem and silently retrying after the configured interval. The problem lies in determining when the problem is transient. I think that the correct way would be to display an informational alert, saying that there was a problem, and if you need to change the stored password, go and delete it from the password manager manually. Just an idea.

Reporter, can you please try reproduce this error on a newer build?

I can reproduce this on an IMAP server with 1.5b2. Our e-mail server has been up and down the last few days and every time it tells me the IMAP server is unavailable I have to re-enter my password.

(In reply to comment #2) > Reporter, can you please try reproduce this error on a newer build? > I believe this is due to the fact that the nsPromptService (called by nsPop3Protocol::Error) blocks the main thread of thunderbird (error is called by nsPop3Protocol::ProcessProtocolState). This stops any new requests (for other servers) from being initiated (as the main thread is blocked waiting for the user to press OK). This architecture does not work well when more than one pop client is configured in thunderbird. Changing this to a status message would cure it, but also make the problem less visible. Of course, if you make a non-blocking message, then it would have to block just that mailbox's GetMail (or you could end up with hundreds of boxes at the end of a night's worth of auto-getmail failures).

Just ran into a user afflicted by this bug. The real problem is that users trust TB to remember their POP password, and may not have it written down anywhere else. So when TB encounters a transient error, the "saved" password is gone for good! Using TB 1.5.0.13 on Ubuntu 7.04

Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 (20080421) is still affected by this bug, after 5 years the bug is reported. :-(

Voting for this bug... GMail goes down at least once a day and that stupid password prompt gets really annoying. BTW, you can still re-check the 'remember password' box before telling it to retry. You just have to do it all three times per interval -- forget even once and the password is gone.

Fixing this old and annoying bug might be simple (2 minutes). Not disable, but just keep enabled the "Use Password Manager to remember password" flag. Hard for me change the sourcecode, I am tring and wasting time. Please, fix this bug.

there are also some dupe bugs around on this. (reporter no longer uses TB and Michael Bravo's addy is dead)

*Please* could someone fix this? It's still true on 2.0.0.16, and this is the most common problem that I, as sysadmin, have to fix for my users. I can see the reason why this misfeature was implemented: if the password on the POP server really *has* changed, then after 3 failures, it's sensible to prompt the user to retry with a new password. BUT, this "automatically-forget-the-saved-password-feature" gets triggered far more often with false positives, caused by (it seems) practically any POP failure. As nobody is assigned to work on this, (and by way of some encouragement), I hereby offer to donate $25 to a charity chosen by the person who fixes this bug ;-)

Sorry, how on earth can this be "Wontfix"? This is the single most annoying bug currently affecting TB - and it has bitten pretty much every single TB user that I know. For advanced users, it's merely slightly annoying, but please remember that most "ordinary" users don't know their POP password from memory, had someone else set it up for them, and probably don't know where to find their original password, on a piece of paper they received some time ago. If TB is asked to "remember my password", then it had really better do so, because now that TB is remembering it, the user feels they can safely forget it. Besides which, it's pretty daft to give the erroneous error message prompting for a new password when actually the POP server is having some other trouble.

I don't know if it was intentionally marked wontfix or not, but it shouldn't be WONTFIX.

Its been FIVE YEARS. No one is going to fix this and I am sick of getting emails about this. Closing ticket. Make a new one if you like.

No, you can filter these emails if you don't want it anymore. That isn't a good reason to close the bug.

(In reply to comment #13) > Its been FIVE YEARS. No one is going to fix this and I am sick of getting > emails about this. Then just filter these emails. You are *not* the owner of this bug, you are *not* the only person who this bug affects. Other people still care about it.

Closing ticket. Make new one.

Marking blocking bug 435306, as this is the POP side of the issue.

And reopening.

Vandalism. Restoring CC data.

Sorry for closing it, Im sure in another 5 years someone *might* look at it.

clarkbw has some ideas for getting rid of modal password prompts that should help with this, and maybe using the new password manager will make it easier for us to deal with changing passwords.

This bug should be fixed now in latest TB 3.0 development build: http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird/browse_thread/thread/8e817351071f24b9

(In reply to comment #22) > This bug should be fixed now in latest TB 3.0 development build: > http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird/browse_thread/thread/8e817351071f24b9 Errm no. I never said it would fix this sort of issue.

My comment was based on this message: http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.apps.thunderbird/browse_thread/thread/2862d09a61b53787/39d163dce3ea773f Anyway, now can it be fixed soon?

I've just seen this again, in 2.0.0.19. The server got into a temporary muddle, and TB responded: "Sending of password did not succeed. Mail server .... responded [IN-USE] Unable to lock maildrop: Mailbox is locked by POP server." Then I got the password prompt again, and after 2 more (failed) attempts, it deleted my saved password. A minute later the server was responding correctly again, but by now, my password was lost!

DUP of 121647?

Getting a password prompt, and subsequently erasing the stored password, as a result of errors not related to authentication, is the #1 cause for a service call from my clients using TB 2.x. Related bugs: Bug 435306 Bug 441889 Bug 555448 Bug 549044

In 3.1, we don't forget the password unless the user asks to enter a new password. 3.1 came out today. I think this is WFM as of 3.1.