I went this entire past weekend with not a single e-mail. Fine, I thought...everyone's just busy. When I got to work yesterday, I signed on to my .Mac account around lunch, just to see if I had any mail...I had like 30, all dating back to last Friday (so I DID get e-mail all weekend...Mail just never displayed/loaded it).
Last night it seemed to work okay...got a couple from my Dad, sent one to a buddy with no problem.
But woke up this morning and Mail had its little "please enter your .Mac password" box open. Weird. So I entered my password, and it kept popping up, requesting my password. I finally cancelled. I checked and my .Mac account was offline and nothing I did seemed to get it back online. Typing my password resulted in a ".Mac servers don't recognize the password for this account" or words to that effect.
I don't mind going through a browser to check my e-mail at .Mac when I'm at work or someone else's house. But when I'm at home, on my PowerBook, I want to be able to use Mail, as I have for the past several years. This is one of those "no rhyme or reason" problems that drive me crazy...stuff just acts silly and uncooperative, out of the blue. And the one thing that SHOULD solve it - typing in my password - doesn't. So hard to diagnose these types of things, because they just happen and make no sense.
The particulars:
- I'm running the latest version of Panther (10.3.9), with all the recent updates for iLife, Java, etc. installed.
- I have NO hacks, modifications or anything of the sort installed. I tend to stay away from that type of stuff because I figure that's just asking for trouble. Honestly, about the only non-Apple software I have on my PowerBook is the Adobe CS package, FontAgent Pro and MacTracker.
- I'm simply using OS X's Panther Mail, with my regular ol' .Mac account I've had for years.
- This morning, I did that "repair permissions" thing, figuring that might have something to do? It didn't help at all.
- I can retrieve my .Mac mail via a browser at Apple's .Mac site...just can't seem to with the standalone Mail.app, these past several days.
Does anyone know what's going on here, and how to fix this?
Is it possible there are some behind-the-scenes work going on in the Tiger transition involving some .Mac features, and perhaps the mail is screwing up a bit? I thought of that this morning, but it seems like a long shot...
My .Mac account - in Mail.app - just wants to stay offline. Entering my password is rejected, over and over again.