A very close friend of mine just had the following puzzling symtoms.

- she changed her gmail password while travelling and using someone else’s computer

- turned on her computer, fired up Outlook and got a password needed prompt (which made sense as her password had, indeed, changed).

- however even after putting in her corrected password the prompt kept returning

- we tried checking all of the account settings, the port numbers per gmail’s help and in short everything on the gmail.com help pages to try.

No luck.

So, I went and did some googlefoo - searching for people posting about related problems - finally on the second page of a thread originally started in 2005 on a message board about GMail, I found a solution.

The solution.

Go to https://www.google.com/accounts/UnlockCaptcha (note the https)

reset your account and the captcha there.

And *poof* Outlook was happy.

Apparently Google, without adding any hints about this on their help pages have added some testing for whether or not someone is a human. However they have added this testing to access which is, in fact, intended for computers to use - i.e. POP3 access of email.

Morals of this story.

1. captcha’s and other measures are good and useful, but take care that they are only an issue where humans are, in fact, intended to be directly accessing the pages

2. I was only able to find the source for this solution because I have been searching online since 1991 (and actually searching electronic databases since the mid-80’s). I knew what types of searches might get me to a forum where a solution could be found, and I was patient enough to look at multiple places and posts until I found one that was likely, and further I put up with the backwards structure of this particular discussion forum which relgated NEW posts to the last pages (contrary to normal best practices which put the current posts first as those are what most people want to read most quickly).

So, if you have further issues with gmail you might check out the GMail Forums where I found this solution.

Or, if you work for Google, you might think about fixing this issue which I would guess 1000’s (if not more) of your users encounter every day. Access denied via a POP3 client, while access is working via the website.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 30th, 2006 at 8:24 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.