Google Apps Mail Fix

I had a strange thing happen today with one of my web design/hosting clients. I got an urgent call that one particular person’s email wasn’t working…which for me is an instant priority.

For this particular client (and most of my recent clients), they were set-up on the free Google Apps system which, while I host their website, all their email goes through the robust Gmail systems which gives them a ton of extra space as well as a top-notch spam filter.

All in all – this has been a great solution for me and has allowed me to offer more “bang for the buck” to my clients…making them happy as taking some of the stresses off my systems.

Well, today was an exception. The problem was that when trying to access a POP3 account through Gmail, one particular client kept getting prompted for a username and password. Doing the smart thing, I ran a series of tests as well as resetting the password and everything checked out. We went through all the settings in her Outlook 2007 email client, item by item, but nothing that I could tell (over the phone) was amiss. I was completely confused.

Arriving at my home office, I set about trying to recreate the problem…which, when setting up the exact same account on my mail client (Entourage) – I in fact was able to recreate the issue. It kept kicking back the error…

“…[ALERT] Web login required (Failure)…”

…and prompting me to re-enter the password…but the password never worked the message would pop up again.

I scoured the web and finally found a solution. What EXACTLY was the fix, I can’t be certain…so I’ll run through the entire process I went through. In essence, what needed to happen was a “soft reset” of the Google App account. Here’s what I did…

1. Logged in to web portal of the email address that was having the problem (logged in to the Gmail systems).
2. Clicked on “Settings”
3. Turned OFF both POP3 and IMAP functionality.
4. Logged off as the user
5. Logged in the domain administrator (whatever account you have as the “adminstrator” on the Google Apps account)
6. Clicked on the option to “Manage This Domain”
7. From the tabs, clicked on “Domain settings”
8. Turned (clicked) off BOTH “Automatically add new Google services” and “Turn on new features”
9. Clicked “Save changes”
10. Turned back ON the two services I just turned off (option – I think the trick is to simply force the system to “reset” itself”).
11. Clicked “Save changes”
12. Logged off as the administrator.
13. Logged in as the email user/account with the problems.
14. Turned back ON the POP3 and/or IMAP (whichever you use).
15. Now try it…it worked for me so it might work for you.

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Tagged as: Apps, browser, developer, email, Google, web