Description of Problem: Sometimes I see this message: Unable to connect to POP server. Error sending password: mail storage services unavailable, wait a few miunutes and try again. Then it prompts me for the password. After 'cancel', future attempts to send/receive mail just prompt for the password; it has apparently forgotten it!
This occurs to my system which is a RH8 with i386 running evolution email with KDE as my desktop. It is a sporadic problem that I can't casue to happen. Sometimes I can't get evolution to accept my pop3 password and sometimes it does. I've exited xwindows, logged out, shutdown and rebooted the system. Sometimes it works, but usually it doesn't. It appears to resolve itself and works for several days. I noticed this first with my initial evolution version and it was still seen after I updated several days ago to version 1.2.0
This is an intentional design decision. If there is an error, it could well be because of an incorrect password and so evolution forgets your password at that point.
It's a bad decision then. This can happen for entirely transient reasons. Why not give it a couple of attempts or something? Or look at the message and figure out if it's a transient error.
This is a transient problem. I enter in the correct pop3 password each time. And it will accept that password on some occasions, but not on others. And when it does accept the password as correct, then maybe somebody can explain why this password is not accepted in the future. This indicates a problem with the storage of the password that is transient in nature and may reflect a corruption of this password. After I upgraded the version of evolution to 1.2.0 the problem with the password does not occur very frequently. I think that my system will go for a week to ten days with any need for me to reenter the correct password again. Let katzj know that this is not due to my entering in a correct password, but it is something buggy with evolution, rh 8 or the combination.
In my case, the error message even says 'try again in a few minutes'.
Unfortunately, it's an error message that could be possibly localized and differs for every POP server on the planet. It's just not something that's reasonable to fix
Huh? Sure it's reasonable to fix. Here's some very reasonable behaviour: Disable automatic send/receive for that session only. (This is exactly what the gnome-panel applet does in the very same situation; I don't have to continually refresh its memory about the password.)
Jeff was convinced to make some changes upstream, but they were deemed too large for backporting to 1.2.x since they depend on some newer infrastructure in the gnome2 port
Current 1.3.x fixes this. Thanks.