Email issue

I am suddenly having problems with my email program. I was using Outlook 2007. All of a sudden it decides to forget what my passwords are; so I have to type them in every time I send/receive. Then last week, it decides to not let me connect at all. I've read where some people are having issues with Outlook 2007, so I decided to try Thunderbird (Mozilla, not the liquor), but get the same results. I've got the settings exactly like the Charter people told me to set them, and I get the following message:

I tried contacting Charter, but they are about a helpful as a punch in the nuts, saying that they can only help with webmail issues.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Try going into the account settings, outgoing server tab, check 'requires authentication' and 'same as incoming'. Also, try the advanced tab and checking 'requires SSL'. Also make sure if the username is either only the part before the @ or the whole e-mail address.

Tried it, got the same message.

I've tried every different combination of usernames and security settings to no avail.

It sounds like you have a problem either with your computer or software.

That's what I'm thinking too. I've changed the software from Outlook to Thunderbird, so...

Use gmail to retrieve your POP3 mail. Easy to access everywhere, easy to search, not nearly as vulnerable to viruses.

I don't know if you've solved this yet Mr. Plow but from the error message it looks like you're using the wrong server address. According to Charter it should be mail.charter.net rather than smtp.charter.net.

The website help says mail.charter.net; the phone tech support (who could be in Calcutta AFAIK) says smtp.charter.net. I've tried both, as well as pinging & using the ip#. Same result each time. I get the feeling that it is a problem with my machine, I just don't know what it is. I've tried deactivating my firewall, removing email scanning, changed email programs; I'm at a loss.

If you can ping the addresses successfully and dropping the firewall doesn't help there's probably a misconfiguration somewhere (though it doesn't hurt to make sure you have entries in your firewall for them).

I just checked mail.charter.net and it is connecting me asking for a password. Is it failing for you before that point or after?

It never asks me for a password.

OK, finally got a resolution to this: Peer Guardian was blocking my mail server for some reason. I disabled PG & email went fine. This is ok for now as I rarely use bittorrent (it's just too slow; I'll enable it when I use it again).

Thanks to all who tried to help.