Q: Mail clients will not send password

Total mystery! My mail clients have suddenly started doing their stuff even though I have done nothing further to my computer other than looking a few things up on the internet. This cannot be due to my ISP previously not accepting my password and suddenly accepting it again, because, as I said in my original post, I have been able to read my mail in my browsers all along, and that presupposes acceptance of my password. It seems too improbable that this phenomenon was caused by an intermittent hardware fault.

I should still be very grateful for any advice in case the problem recurrs.

I posted this at around 18:00 or 19:00 British time, BDAqua. I make that 10:00 or 11:00 PST, so there is indeed a mysterious lapse of an hour and a half to two hours and a half or so.

I did the unpardonable thing of also posting this in the OSX Tiger discussion, and that started a detailed discussion with someone who more-or-less convinced me that all my playing around with databases and Open Firmware was irrelevant and the whole thing was caused by a temporary failure by my ISP to recognize my password.

I am still not quite convinced, though. My ISP's mail system is web mail. When I go to my mail page in a browser, my password is automatically recognized; I don't have to type it in except once every few weeks, when the ISP checks up on it. When I try to download mail by means of a mail client, the client sends (or should send) my password (stored by the mail client).

So why was my ISP recognizing it from my browser in web mail, but not from my mail client? My correspondent  insisted that in the one case I was reading mail from the internet, but in the other I was downloading it from a mail server situated at my ISP's location, and that the two processes were quite distinct. My argument was that in both cases the password originated in my computer (otherwise anyone who had obtained my e-mail address could go to my ISP's mail page and read my mail), so that the malfunction had to be located in my computer.

I am still not quite sure which is right.

But are these various ports part of the ISP's equipment and software, or are they situated in my computer? If the former, then my problem was caused by my ISP. If the latter, then there must have been (and so potentially still is) something wrong in my system.

Do you know Bartok's opera 'Bluebeard's Castle'? Seven doors, each leading to a different aspect of Bluebeard's past and his unconscious (a very Freudian opera!). Through the last door, his over-inquisitive new bride at last joins his previous six wives...but all the doors are in Duke Bluebeard's castle (or his unconscious mind, if you prefer), not somewhere out in a bit of cyber-space belonging to an ISP.

Ah, that explains a lot. Thank you. And at the moment A, B, C, D and E all seem to be awake, eating their lunches at their desks and replying to each other. BTW, when you asked (in connection with the curious time-lapse in my original post) whether i had used e-mail to post my question, I forgot to answwr. No, I just went to the Apple Discussions site and entered my question in the ordinary way.

I suspect you are right. It was just that my ISP (btinternet.com) is usually very reliable and fault-free (though quite expensive and not always very good at answering questions); that I had never before had a situation in which I could browse the net, read my e-mails in my browser, edit my photos and enter my music into my music typesetting program, but could not download my e-mails; and that the problem arose twice within a few days of each other, once shortly after I had suffered a crash that had necessitated my turning my computer off by the power switch, and the other time shortly after we had suffered a brief mains power cut while I had the computer running, that made me suspect my machine and not my ISP. On top of which, the first time it happened, my doing all those things like running DiskWarrior, rebuilding the LaunchServices database and re-setting PRAM and Open Firmware seemed to cure the problem — which was, presumably, due to a mere coincidence between the time I finished all that stuff and BT getting its act together (temporarily).

Anyhow, all's well (at present) that ends well.