GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 581949
Evolution asks for account passwords at inappropriate times
Last modified: 2010-03-25 15:37:49 UTC
First off, I'm not sure if this falls under the Mailer component or not. Second, I'm not sure if I should have counted this as normal or not. For most people it's just really annoying. Under some circumstances it can render Evolution almost useless for a particular purpose. The problem: Evolution keeps asking for the account password to be entered when it's alread in the keyring. This appears to be triggered by any kind of network disruption. You can use Evolution for days without problems. It gets the password info from the keyring and all goes well. Then you start a file tranfer that swamps your connection. Evolution attempts to get the mail. The connection fails. It asks for a password. Your DNS server momentarily fails. Evolution asks for a password. Your re-arrange your wiring closet. Evolution asks for a password. Your ISP's mail server is temporarily unavailable. Evolution asks for a password. Your DSL connection fails. Evolution asks for a password. I can't tell you how annoying this is, given that I have 7 email accounts. There's absolutely no reason why Evolution needs to be asking for passwords just because it can't contact the mail server for one reason or another. I've listed this as a major bug because I use a forwarding message rule. I use Evolution at home but there are certain companies from whom I receive urgent emails. I have a filter rule set up that, when an email is received from a listed sender, forwards the email to my work address. This feature is rendered useless when Evolution encounters a connectivity problem and then stupidly asks for a password which I can't update until I get home. Suggestions: I understand that when Evolution's connection to a mail server is rejected because of a bad password, it should obviously be asking for a new one but it should never do this because of connectivity problem. Consider the following: - Have Evolution parse the SMTP server's responses more accurately so that it only responds to bad passwords. I realize that different SMTP servers might send back different response strings and so this may be difficult to implement. - Alternatively, ping the SMTP server before connecting to the mail server(s), or this web site, or Google, or something that will respond to confirm that a connection is established. - Similarly, you could also send a TCP packet out somewhere with a very short Time-To-Live (like 3 - user configurable) so that Evolution will get a response from the intended destination or a response from some device along the way indicating that the packet has been dropped because the TTL has been exceeded. Either way, it will confirm connectivity. - If you must ask for a password, give the option of trying again with the same password. That is to say; present a new password dialogue but provide the buttons; "Cancel", "OK", "Try again with previous password"
I'd like to second this. There seems to be an assumption in Evolution (and also in nm-applet, for that matter) that any connection failure can be fixed with a new password.
Agreed - I am running 2.28.1 in Ubuntu and am in the rather awkward situation where some of my friends and colleagues want me to convert their systems from Vista to Ubuntu. I am happy to do so, but am not looking forward to having to explain this issue to them. To my mind Evolution is one of the premier apps in Ubuntu, along with openOffice, and as such there should be some form of graceful recovery from connectivity issues. I am now running Thunderbird as my main email due to this problem. One partial work around I found was to give Evolution read-only access to Seahorse once all the passwords had been put in place. Thus when connectivity wobbles, instead of deleting my password and then asking for a new one, Evolution now asks for permission to access the keyring - which I deny and then cancel the next next query window. Doing send/receive shortly after this everything works fine. One further comment: I have tried Evolution in openSuse and in Debian Lenny. This same issue occurs. Please let me know if I can help in some way to fix this. Grayman
I occuring the same problem : evolution asking a remenber password when i have a problem with my pop server : Unable to connect to POP serveur pop.free.fr Error sending password: -ERR internal server error Please entre the POP password for roumano@free.fr on host pop.free.fr ___________________ [v] Remember this password
This seems to be the same problem I have (still present itself in evolution-2.29.91). This problem seems to be with unstable POP-servers. The servers I have problem with (beloning to Telia) I know others who use Outlook has had problem with too. When they are using Outlook they get a prompt from Outlook to reenter their password, however if they just klick "Ok" the Outlook tries again with their old password. The problem with evolution seems to be that the first time it fails to connect it drops the password (removes it from seahorse) and and you have to reenter the password from scratch. I think evolution should not drop the old password before it has a new one to try with.
Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 337479 ***