I have had two Yahoo mail addresses for several years, and have always downloaded incoming mail using POP3 to Outlook (originally OL 2003, for the last year or so, OL 2010). This has been working successfully all this time (until recently). I have read comments that Yahoo does not support POP3, but I understand that this only applies to certain countries for some reason (notably USA). In any case, it works fine in my country (Australia). In troubleshooting this problem, I have revisited the Yahoo mail options and it is still there and still set up under “POP & Forwarding”.
So, the problem: a couple of weeks ago, I started getting pop-up messages from Outlook prompting for User Name and Password (both of which fields were already populated with the correct information). This suggests to me that Outlook failed to login to the Yahoo POP3 mail server. It happens with both my Yahoo email addresses, but not with other addresses that I have with Gmail and my ISP.
Searching through the Lounge to see if this problem has been reported before, I found only one which was similar
(http://windowssecrets.com/forums/showthread//142961-Outlook-2010-on-Windows-7?highlight=yahoo%2Bpop%2Boutlook). The solution given there is not applicable to me (upgrade to paid service).
In my case, the problem is not that I cannot connect at all, just that the failure to connect is intermittent. Currently, I have Outlook set to check the servers every 30 minutes. In the last 2-3 weeks, more often than not, the Yahoo connection fails on one or both of my Yahoo accounts with the resulting pop-up described above. However, sometimes it gets through OK. One impact is that I may have to wait a few hours to get my mail downloaded. Another is that every half hour I get the pop-up suddenly displaying on top of the window I am working on at the time (VERY annoying after a while!).
At first I thought it might be an internet problem, but I am not having any other network problems — even the Yahoo SMTP server connects every time when I am sending email. I have pinged the POP3 server a number of times: it always responds normally. Accessing my accounts via webmail also works OK.
I was about to add that I seem to have gotten a reprieve today, with no occurrences of the problem. But then I had the dreaded pop-up appear while typing this post.
Anyway, I was just wondering if anyone has seen this before and, better yet, has an answer to what is happening, hopefully also a solution! I am thinking of changing over to Gmail as my primary address, but that would be a major project as my Yahoo addresses are in use by too many people and subscriptions.
Forwarding, rather than POPping is another alternative, but that has problems as well (which I may save for a separate thread).
Thanks for any help.
Pete.
PS: Operating system is Windows 7 Pro (x64)
Dell Precision 3630 w/32 GB RAM, 500 GB (C:), 1 TB (D:)
Window 10 Pro x64
Internet: FTTC (Fibre to the Kerb)
