From time to time your users will run into problems when logging into Outlook or Outlook Express. The causes of these logon problems are varied and will require different troubleshooting paths.

Occasionally Outlook Express and Outlook will repeatedly prompt your end user(s) for their password when they check messages on an Exchange Server. Other times you will get an end user who complains about a looping logon prompt window that continues to ask for the user’s username and password only to pop right back up and ask for the same information. This problem is most often seen by users of Outlook Express. Attempts at re-entering the user information are also unsuccessful. An error message you may see is something like:

“There was a problem logging onto your mail server. Your Password was rejected. Account: ‘pop.company.hotmail.com’, Server: ‘pop.company.hotmail.com’, Protocol: POP3, Server Response: ‘-ERR invalid user/password’, Port: 110, Secure(SSL): No, Server Error: 0x800CCC90, Error Number: 0x800CCC92″

At this point you can try your other email clients to see if you can log on through different email clients. If you are able to do that then you know that it is not a problem with your username and password combination. If however you find that you are still having problems then you have to consider the possibility that your account settings have been changed and you will have to decide which method you will use to resolve this problem.

If you believe that your username and password combination has not been changed then you can create a new email account using your original email settings and also a new identity in Outlook Express. It is not necessary to delete your original identity before creating your new identity. During the process of creating your new identity you will be asked if you want to use the new identity in place of the original. You should answer “yes” to this question. This will cause Outlook Express to close and then reopen using your newly created identity. After you have created your new identity you can then check if this has resolved the repeating login box cycle.

It is also possible that the repeating login box cycle is a result of a downed email server. If this is a planned downtime then you, as the administrator, should have already sent out messages beforehand and warned your users of the planned downtime. If not, then this is a good time to incorporate this necessary practice into your regular email maintenance policies.

If your end user(s) are still having trouble with their logon process then you may need to check the Exchange server. The default POP3 and IMAP4 authentication settings for Exchange Server are set for “clear text authentication”. You can try to change this setting by adding the following information:

NTDomainNTDomainIDExchangeMailAlias

If your domain name is “domain_name”, your account name is “account_name” and the alias for your Exchange server alias is “Exchange_alias_name” then your account name will be:

domain_nameaccount_nameExchange_alias_name

Your account name in Outlook Express can be found by going to the Tools menu and clicking on Accounts. Then click on the Mail tab and locate your email account. Click on Properties and then the Services tab.

Another logon problem situation your users can sometimes experience is when POP3 and IMAP4 clients cannot logon to the Exchange server. They will get an error message with a value of 13003 as the event ID.

On the Exchange Server-based computer, the following information is registered in the Application log:
Event ID: 13003
Source: MSExchange Pop3
Type: Error
Category: Authentication
Description: Logon attempt from 0.0.0.0 to alias failed: HrLookupCredentials() call failed with error Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password.

If your user attempts to retrieve any messages then they will usually get a dialog box that will display the following error message already mentioned above (but repeated here again) on the Errors tab, under Details:

“There was a problem logging onto your mail server. Your Password was rejected. Account: ‘alias on Server’, Server: ‘server’, Protocol: POP3, Server Response: ‘-ERR Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password.’, Port 110, Secure(SSL): No, Server Error: 0x800CCC90, Error Number: 0x800CCC92”

This is usually the result of a failed call to HrLookupCredentials upon user logon.

We’ve already covered one technique for how to handle this problem if the Exchange Server mailbox alias is different from the Microsoft Windows user account name by adding the following information:

NTDomainNTDomainIDExchangeMailAlias

You can also try changing the mailbox alias for the Exchange server to be the same as the Windows user account name. Although this will remove an extra level of security by having the same user names for logon it will make managing the accounts a little simpler.

Another solution is to create a second mailbox alias on the Exchange server so that it matches the account name of the Windows user.