Everyone wants their problems solved NOW!  Me included.

Web server management is a pretty complex thing.  There is a lot of stuff to know and learn and tweak.  Some things you do often enough that it becomes second nature, other things need a bit of reference work.

A customer whose email password is failing is a frequent issue.  They have often forgotten their password or something like that.

But imagine when email keeps failing and the password is reset and it still fails and everything looks 100% perfect and it still fails.

If there is one thing I am good at in life it is trouble-shooting.  I have a knack for being able to track through the steps of a problem and find what is wrong.  I can’t even explain how I do it, but I can.  Don’t assume that means I can also fix it, but at least know why it isn’t working and that is a good start.

So this password just won’t work.  Then I have an idea.  What if it is something about the actual password?  So I reset her mail password to something easy and BINGO! she gets into mail.

We went back to the original password which was something like Jumpy05#&* and working with the customer logging into webmail, started building the password

Jumpy05 - worked
Jumpy05# - worked
Jumpy05#& - failed!

Aha!!! Talk about obscure.  Who would have ever guessed that?  The fix, obviously, was a new password without an & in it.

By the way, not withstanding the error, that is an example of a good password. It might be memorable to you because of Jumpy (dog’s name) 05 (your birth date) and 3 symbols.

Still trying to discover why the & failed, haven’t had any answers in forums where I have asked.