outlook popup message requesting user name and password

It comes up regularly for all my email accounts.  Sometimes the emails download without the message popping up for each account, but often the message pops up.

If you go back thru previous questions on this forum, you will find that you are not alone.  I got the popup for months.  Cox asked us to email our account info to cox.help@cox.com  ( i hope i got that right).  I did that and the problem was fixed.

I was able to sometimes get my mail to work by hitting the Get Mail button or closing-and-reopening my email program.  You are correct; when you get that popup box, entering the user name and password does not work.

This is a widely-known problem that "recently" showed up with POP (and probably other) Cox email. Mention has been made multiple places here and on other external-to-Cox sites like DSLReports about the problem - as far as I can see, Cox isn't aware (or is not acknowledging being aware) that this is an ongoing fairly-recent problem experienced by multiple users around the country and is due to some problem at COX, not the users - it used to be, for many years, that Cox was rock-solid with POP email and also extremely fast to receive email from external sites - this certainly is not the case at this typing.

However, the problem may be worse than just a transient inability for Cox's servers to authenticate valid email login information. This morning I wanted to log into a site that sends me a numeric passcode via email that it requires I type in before I can login. Since that passcode email was simply not showing up via a POP access to Cox, I directly logged into Cox Webmail online and tried, tried again - the incoming-to-Cox emails were taking extensive time to show up on Webmail - like 10 minutes or more.

And right now, I have a query into an accountant asking about tax filings and the expected rapid response from them is nonexistent. This has never happened before with that firm.

Because of this, I'm beginning to fear that Cox actually is DROPPING incoming some email as well.

But, in any case, the problem with authentication failure is NOT YOURS; it for sure is Cox's.

DerrickW said:
When the box pops up does it have the entire email address in the username field?

See the sullyguy posts from today on DSL Reports for an image of the authentication error - I can't get the "Insert Image" to work here on Cox:

http://www.dslreports.com/speak/boardmark/29887202?bstart=1&url=/forum/remark,29887202

This is an example of a Thunderbird failure-to-authenticate with Cox POP server(s). This is transient - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It used to always work and always be very very fast (i.e, 6 different Cox email accounts checked via POP in about 8 seconds); now all successful logins are taking multiple seconds each and these intermittent failures are occurring as well - the account(s) with the failures appear to be random from the accounts being checked.

Given the strange transientness of the authentication failures, could some sort of race condition between two (or more) POP servers at Cox be causing the "swallowing" of messages sent from our email clients to Cox's servers be taking place?

just a (naive) thought...

DerrickW said:
seabird66,

When the box pops up does it have the entire email address in the username field?  If so, remove the "@cox.net" part, that would stop it from working.  You can also test the email login information also by going to our website.

I also have been receiving this pop up. When I mentioned it to the chat assistance person, they merely directed me to the link for setting up Outlook. I originally thought that perhaps it was an  IMAP issue, so I added a POP account also, however, both give the pop up.

For the last 10 days or so cox has been dropping some emails that contain attachments-by "dropping", I mean that they never get to either Outlook OR webmail. If I have the emails sent to a yahoo email address, there is not a problem (other than having to use yahoo). However, messages WITHOUT attachments from the same senders arrive. So in addition to the annoying pop ups, it appears that some emails are getting rejected at the mail server.

Hopefully Cox is paying attention to this issue and will get it resolved quickly. I can't imagine business users would be satisfied with either of the above issues.

I'm obviously not seabird66, but I can report for my part that the problem seems to not occur over webmail. 

It *does* occur over my other machines - WinXP box running Outlook 2010; a Win7 laptop with Windows Live Mail and Outlook;  and a six-month old Samsung Galaxy S5.

I've been having connection failures with my Cox email accounts for some time. I changed the settings to pop.cox.net and smtp.cox.net a long time ago, but that solved nothing.

I get a "can't connect - enter username and password" error on two accounts several times a day - every day.

I'm using a Mac and Apple's Mail - but that has nothing to do with the problem. Many people are having this same problem, using a variety of systems and mail apps.