BACKGROUND

For reasons to do with various webmail features being withdrawn or made hard to use by my ISP, I have for the last few years had email accounts with both BT and Yahoo. I have three "real" email addresses, two with BT, main and spare, and one with Yahoo. I also have a long standing personal (and permanent) "virtual" address that is the one known to all but a few contacts and that gets forwarded by the domain registrar to one of the "real" addresses -- currently to Yahoo.

I generally look for incoming traffic on Yahoo webmail through the day, delete the rubbish, reply if urgent, then usually once a day download stuff to be kept from all three supplier inboxes, make most of any remaining replies and new emails, on Seamonkey 2.49.3 running under Slackware 14.0.

Seamonkey used the BT SMTP server (both BT and Yahoo accept personal addresses from SMTP clients, although BT no longer allow them on outgoing webmail, which is one of the reasons for the Yahoo account).

THE RECENT PROBLEMS

Everything worked fine for years until last Monday (this is Wednesday), when I clicked "Get Messages". BT_spare and Yahoo POP'd as normal, but BT_main told me that my userid or password was invalid. Ditto with SMTP, which used the BT_main account. I could still log in to all the webmails.

I thought that perhaps Seamonkey's data had got corrupted (although not the userid or password because I could see the former and re-enter the latter). I had backed up the whole of ~/.mozilla on 12th Feb, and it had been working since then. So I recovered the backup, and the same happened.

I re-did the SMTP spec to use the Yahoo server, and that worked just fine.

My conclusion -- that I have since changed, but I'll come to that -- was that something had changed at the BT end. Either their database had a fault (as happened once before but the other way round, when I could POP and SMTP but not log in to their web site), or else perhaps support for "personal" addresses had been withdrawn without notice. In case it was the latter, I changed the POP config of BT_main to be like that of BT_spare, but that made no difference.

So I phoned BT. They said that the web-login data for my account was OK, which I already knew, but they were unable to check the email client data.

It looked like a BT problem -- until this morning.

THE PLOT THICKENS

This morning, Yahoo threw me out. I couldn't POP or SMTP. The symptoms were slightly different, but essentially the same: sometimes a password prompt but not always, then a long, long hang, then "server error, try later", which I believe is a euphemism for "you're a hacker, go away". BUT I could still POP from BT_spare, and I could still log in to all three web sites.

So it looked like the problem was at my end after all. I had already tried the 12 Feb backup (old SMTP spec). Maybe it wasn't the data in ~/.mozilla that was corrupted, maybe it was Seamonkey itself, which lives in /local/.../seamonkey-2.49.3/. That was backed up ages ago and should not have changed. I did a full directory tree comparison with the backup: names, timestamps, sizes and full content. Identical.

And both .../seamonkey-2.49.3/... and ~/.mozilla/... have been virus-scanned. If it's not in either of them, then where? Maybe a dynamically loaded module? I don't know where then all live, but I have a pretty old backup of the system libraries, and I did full tree comparisons of /bin, /lib, /lib64, /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /usr/lib64. They showed nothing apart from some AVlib stuff that wasn't on the backup or had been updated since, and a few things that have been deleted from the live disc over time, but no files except the AVlib updates have actually been altered.

Finally, I retrieved a backup of ~/.mozilla made on Monday, after BT_main packed in but when Yahoo POP still worked and the new Yahoo SMTP was operational. It failed the same as the "current" version did his morning.

So, unless BT and Yahoo both got the same errors two days apart, the fault is somewhere I don't know to look. I will be very grateful for whatever help you can give.

Has anything changed recently to your knowledge and are you able to confirm if you have the same problem on another computer?

Hi Gad.

The only deliberate changes in the last few months were the ones described above made in response to the developing problem. Accidental changes can be ruled out because, each time, running a restored copy of a backup of the ~/.mozilla directory (the data directory) saved when all or something was working gives exactly the new behaviour as the latest "live" directory. That is, a backup made before Monday shared Monday morning's BT_main problem. A backup made on Monday evening, after the SMTP had been switched to Yahoo (and was working) shared Thursday's failure of both Yahoo POP and SMTP.

The directory containing Seamonkey itself (as opposed to its data) hasn't changed at all, in any way. That was verified by comparison with a backup made when it was installed.

That leaves hardware or something dynamically linked that has been corrupted. I've checked /lib64 etc against an old backup (see original post) but there are probably other places I don't know about.

Unfortunately I don't have another computer to compare.