Puzzling email problem

[dflour69]

I've been with Sky broadband for 15 months now and, happily, have had a trouble free time. However, I've now struck a problem with email. It is as follows:

Me and the wife have a total of 5 email addresses. They were all set up early on and all worked. Then came the switch over to GoogleMail (?). I changed all the settings for all the addresses and they all continued to work without a hitch. However, recently, two of our email addresses can no longer be accessed using our POP3 emailer (Pegasus). I constantly get a message saying that the username or password is wrong. However, I can still access these two addresses through the sky web email portal using the same usernames and passwords. I have checked and rechecked all the settings, etc. Coincidently (or not) the two email addresses that have gone **** up are the least active. Anyone got any suggestions/ideas? I am fairly experienced with computers and I have been using the net since I had a 14.4 modem.

Thanks in advance.

[moleman]

They may have become "Locked".

You can unlock them Here

[PaulSky]

Also if that does not work try doing a password reset on the affected accounts just in case.

[dflour69]

Wow, moleman, problem solved. Both accounts 'unlocked'. Thanks very much. What a peculiar thing. Any idea what had happened? Was it something to do with them being comparatively inactive? Thanks also to PaulSky.

[moleman]

I've no idea what causes them to "lock", but I've had it happen to me when I've mistyped a password whilst setting up a new system. I assume it's a security thing if they think someone is trying to hack into your account. The annoying thing is once you have corrected your mistake you get the same error message about incorrect username or password so you don't realise what has happened.

[dflour69]

Hmmm. I don't think I mistyped anything as the accounts were already set up and working (I had tested them both after the migration to GMail). Also, I could still access them via Sky webmail. I find it odd that they were the two least used accounts, though why that had anything to do with it I can't imagine. Obviously it happens quite often, otherwise there wouldn't be an unlock facility in existence.

[PaulSky]

UnlockCaptcha basically just unlocks the POP side and its a know issue that some accounts have locked for no reason and its not just the sky accounts doing it as Google had the unlock tool in place before sky went with them.