I just became a member of Yahoo's Mail PLUS where I pay and I should get benefits like POP mail and 2 GB of storage space. I followed Yahoo's instructions on getting Yahoo mail using an external mail client. I have tried Thunderbird, KMail and even in Windows XP's Microsoft Outlook express and Microsoft Outlook XP. I keep getting the same error that says that there was an error sending the password. Can you folks think of any network reasons why I cannot access Yahoo mail via POP? I am not using any secure authentication methods and I am not using SSL/TSL, as per their instruction. Their information is:

POP: pop.mail.yahoo.com
smtp: smtp.mail.yahoo.com

Pretty basic, right? Could it be my router firewall or something? I am able to receive my other mail (SSL mail account) perfectly using Outlook and Thunderbird in Linux and in Windows. Could this be a Yahoo-side problem??? I emailed the Yahoo people 2 days ago and still no response! I never should have signed up for a Yahoo mail account.

can you connect to it from a machine outside of your network via POP
if yes
can you access your account manually using a stupid client like telnet

Not a stupid question at all! I have tried that by typing this in the console

telnet pop.mail.yahoo.com 110

(logs in successfully and I get the greeting message)

I then type

user username
(it then says OK! requires password)
pass mypassword
I then get an error about my password, even though I have checked that it is spelled accurately. IN fact, my username and password work fine at the http://mail.yahoo.com website.

So to answer your question, no, I am not even able to telnet into the site because of the password problem. Could this be a Yahoo-side problem? Or is it something with my computer/router???

As for trying it on a machine outside my network, I will have to this at work and see what happens. I hate using telnet, though, since it's not encrypted and the password is in full text view.

well the critical point now would be if it would work from outside your network, this should then narrow the fault down a bit.

To connecting with telnet

the the telnet protocol as well as smtp and pop are all in plain text

so using telnet (application) or lets say thunderbird won't make a difference on a pure POP as both send the password in plain.

Thanks for the response. I will try telnetting at work and see what happens.

It's good to know that all my information is being sent in plain text. lol How safe is this, by the way? Can someone intercept this data? Can someone on their side see this??

Aha!! It was a Yahoo problem. They wrote back to me and told me to try to POP again and this time it worked! I did not change any configurations on my computer.

as i understand it, all email is sent unencrypted so if someone captures those packets (they would need to be listening on your network, or intercepting all traffic to/from your IP i think) they could just open them up and read anything inside. even using ssl doesn't protect your email i believe, it only protects your conversations with the mail server. in other words, no one could read your name or password or what you told the mail server to do, but if an email popped out 2 minutes later they could read that. i'm pretty sure anyway.