Email - Unable to Sign In - Intermittent Errors

[Unclevanya]

I have been using GMX.com for my primary email provider for about the last 2-3 months and generally it has worked great. However last week without making any changes to the Pre Plus I have it started getting an "Unable to sign in" error frequently. The error isn't consistent - I still get email if I retry a few times and I my sent items all still make it out without hanging up in the outbox.

I've had to switch the phone from getting mail "as it arrives" to "every 6 hours" to reduce the annoying flashing notification led. I'm pretty frustrated - any ideas?

I have read these threads that seem related but one has nothing to offer and the other (yahoo one) has nothing I haven't tried.

http://forums.precentral.net/palm-pr...ail-issue.html
http://forums.precentral.net/webos-s...hoo-email.html

[Unclevanya]

Originally Posted by RUSH

If you could find your user Id, and password on your phone - you could then remove and re-add them both. I have this problem a lot with yahoo, and that step seem to fix it.
Note: I know you said that you have tried everything, but when you re-sign back in - make sure your user Id, and password are correct.

To be more explicit - I have changed passwords on the email vendor side and verified the new password outside WebOS and made the changes inside WebOS and while it works it is no better than before. I thought I had isolated it because when I logged into email via browser I got a password change nag since it had been about 2 months since I changed it - I was wondering if perhaps that was related - it turns out it wasn't.

This works fine on Gmail BTW and worked great on GMX for a couple of months... very confused.

[Unclevanya]

Originally Posted by RUSH

...If that doesn't work you could request a new password. That should solve that issue.

Good luck. -

I didn't lose access to the account. The password works - it isn't consistent from WebOS but it works. It works consistently from a browser.

[Unclevanya]

Originally Posted by RUSH

...The only thing left for you to do now - is to get in contact with customer support, and discuss your situation with them.

Ps. I don't believe your problem is cause by your phone.

Best of luck -

Hummmm.... given that a Yahoo user has seen this also why do you think that?

My wife has a similar situation with Time Warner - she has intermittent failures to send email. She gets a similar message and retrying multiple times seems to fix it.

[Unclevanya]

Originally Posted by RUSH

...As well as removing and reinserting the battery, or be prepared to set the phone back to its original state(Factory default settings). Either one of those two trouble-shooting usually corrects most, if not all problems.

I have not doctor'd but I have removed battery.

[Unclevanya]

Any other ideas folks? Besides a visit to the Doc? I'll do it if I have to but given that my wife's stock pre plus has a similar issue with a email vendor and I have seen at least two other people speak up about similar issues - I don't think a stock webOS install is going to fix this.

[delacro]

I had this issue this morning with my yahoo account. I received a notification stating that I need to re-enter my password. After I tried to enter my password I kept getting an error, wrong password.

I finally just deleted the account then added the account and it worked.

[stu5797]

Can someone make a patch so that "unable to sign in" does not pop up?

[prolongexistence]

I constantly have the same issue with my MSN (Hotmail) account and occasionally with my Comcast.net account. But, when I open the email app and hit the refresh button, it manages to sign in and check my mail. I believe the issue is that the email server is busy, or lagging or whatever and that WebOS is timing out. That being said, is there possibly a way to adjust the time out time? Probably a patch, or maybe even an additional setting for Sconix's ACSP patch?

[PrinceAlbert]

Our local phone company email addresses are getting "Unable to sign in" error intermittently.
But, Gmail and work emails are not getting this error at all. weird behavior and unsure how to resolve.

[prolongexistence]

Originally Posted by PrinceAlbert

Our local phone company email addresses are getting "Unable to sign in" error intermittently.
But, Gmail and work emails are not getting this error at all. weird behavior and unsure how to resolve.

Yes, I have no problem with gmail, aim (aol), or even a goDaddy hosted address. This just reinforces my point that it's not really anything wrong with the phone. I really believe that the servers are just taking to long to respond and the phone is timing out.

[cmahy]

I slso have this issue - never with eMail, but with my Company's hosted exchange (connected as IMAP vs. Activesync).

The problem seems to go through three phases - each with the following workarounds (sorry, no solution):

-First phase: 'Unable to Sign In': I work around this by hitting refresh

-Second phase: 'Unable to Sign In' & won't refresh away: I reduce the # of mails in my inbox (ie: delete or move to subfolders) & refresh to work around this

-Third phase: 'Unable to Sign In' - nothing fixes it. I delete & re-add my eMail account. That usually gives me multiple weeks until phase 1 starts again.

It appears that WebOS mail gets tied up so that it times out the server - I think it's a WebOS IMAP interface issue vs. Mail host issue.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre using Forums Beta

[prolongexistence]

Originally Posted by cmahy

I slso have this issue - never with eMail, but with my Company's hosted exchange (connected as IMAP vs. Activesync).

The problem seems to go through three phases - each with the following workarounds (sorry, no solution):

-First phase: 'Unable to Sign In': I work around this by hitting refresh

-Second phase: 'Unable to Sign In' & won't refresh away: I reduce the # of mails in my inbox (ie: delete or move to subfolders) & refresh to work around this

-Third phase: 'Unable to Sign In' - nothing fixes it. I delete & re-add my eMail account. That usually gives me multiple weeks until phase 1 starts again.

It appears that WebOS mail gets tied up so that it times out the server - I think it's a WebOS IMAP interface issue vs. Mail host issue.

-- Sent from my Palm Pre using Forums Beta

While I'm not sure about the OP, both accounts I have issues with are POP3 accounts. IMAP always works fine for me.

[Pulp]

The free version of Gmx limits the number of logins in a give time, if you login to often the login fails until some time has passed - maybe that's what happened to you?

[cmahy]

Originally Posted by prolongexistence

While I'm not sure about the OP, both accounts I have issues with are POP3 accounts. IMAP always works fine for me.

Prolongexistence -- thanks: sounds like it's a more generic issue than I thought. What's particularly odd is that it seems to hit us all differently.

I wonder if there's more of a pattern to this than we're catching on. For example, here's what I have:

Accounts (as listed in the Mail app)
*Primary Account: GMail -- no issues
IMAP / Hosted exchange -- has the issues occasionally as noted above
Yahoo Account 1 -- No issues
Yahoo Account 2 -- No issues

Both GMail and Yahoo are using IMAP by default.
Only my Hosted IMAP exchange did not auto-configure -- I had to manually configure that account settings.

Perhaps if we all list what accounts we have and how they are configured -- we might get lucky and find a pattern.

[Shadavis08]

I believe most issues with email stem from not emptying the trash folder . It can back up and slow down the whole phone. And like someome else posted , the best temp fix I have found is to delete the account , then re add the account . I have this issue once in a great while with hotmail only. My other three accounts work fine.

[PrinceAlbert]

My account that has this issue:
Local ISP email account
IMAP
No emails saved - this email account is forwarded to a Gmail account.

Have not tried to delete and re-setup, but will try that the next time it happens (just happened again last evening).

[cmahy]

Originally Posted by Shadavis08

I believe most issues with email stem from not emptying the trash folder . It can back up and slow down the whole phone. And like someome else posted , the best temp fix I have found is to delete the account , then re add the account . I have this issue once in a great while with hotmail only. My other three accounts work fine.

Good catch -- you might have found the pattern I was looking for. For me, I don't delete much on my GMail or Yahoo accounts, but, I delete a much higher volume of data on my hosted exchange/IMAP. In addition to that, I only empty the trash folder occasionally -- when it gets multiple hundreds of messages.

I hit my 'scenario 1' yesterday (unable to access eMail + refresh worked ok) --> normally, scenario 2 happens within a few days & I'm required to delete/re-add (scenario 3) within a week or so.

So, with that in mind, I just emptied my trash folder. Fingers crossed: if the issue stays away for a while, we may have the culprit. I'll keep you all posted.

Having said that, this is still a software bug in my humble opinion -- WebOS mail is only configured to retrieve items up to 7 days old -- as long as there aren't hundreds of messages in the folders in the 7 day period, it shouldn't be timing out while accessing the account. If we are able to find out how to keep this from happening (keep a clean trashcan), than this will hopefully turn into a low-grade issue.

[puzzlegal]

I had a similar issue with my prior email service (emailthatworks, now defunct.) It seems to have gone away with my new service (fastmail). My hypothesis was that the problem happened when my Pre and my home computer both tried to talk to the email server at the same time (which I guess would be more common if the folders were stuffed full, and each transaction was slow.) That's consistent with my noticing that this service is much faster, so I suppose the odds of both devices talking at "the same time" are much lower.

Anyhow, while I think it's sort of a bug, I considered it an annoyance rather than something that needed to be fixed, and I just ignored it.

I get a lot of email. I turned off the notification light for new email ages ago, shortly after Palm made it available. It just meant the light was always on. I don't recall if the "can't sign in" turned the light on or not. But perhaps you can just find an option (or patch) to keep it from going on for any email event.

[Mr._Happy]

I don't have this problem.

I'm using Gmail and Yahoo.

My girlfriend does have this problem: with her MAC account and her MSN Hotmail account.

Her Yahoo and Gmail work fine.