My cox email account all of a sudden wants my password. I have a web mail account, but I also have a shadow that sends and receives cox mail. This account does not contain the same mail as web mail...
It sounds like the password in your client needs to be re-entered or your client may need to be repaired. If you have your web client set up as IMAP and you deleted your emails on it they would also delete the emails on our server as well.