KB 67

Twig keeps asking for username and password when I try to read a message

Article:67
Created:2000-06-29 11:29:07
Categories:
  E-mail

Question or Symptom

I am checking my mail using twig and while I can get a list of my email, I can't see the actual piece of mail. When I click on the item in my inbox, it asks for my password again.

Resolution

Hi, we've found two things that cause this behavior, both having to do with the fact that TWIG uses cookies to manage the user's session.

One is if your browser is not accepting cookies. With Internet Explorer, go to the Internet Control Panel, select the Security tab, and see what security level you have set. The highest level disables cookies. I think all but the highest level will work OK (e.g. "medium-high" is a reasonable choice). If you need to leave it on high, you can click the "custom settings" button and turn on cookies in the highest level.

If you're using Netscape, go to Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced and turn on the "Only accept cookies originating from the same server as the page being viewed" section.

The other possible problem is the PC's date. We found someone who was having this problem even though they were allowing cookies to be set. It turns out that these cookies expire after a little while. This session time-out is so that if you walk away from your computer and forget to log out, someone else can't come up to it and start reading your email without entering a password. Anyway, the date on this person's computer was set 24 hours in advance. The time was right, the time zone was right, but the date was "tomorrow". If the time/date are wrong on the PC, then there's a mismatch between the PC and the server, and the server thinks that the cookies have timed out as soon as they were issued. The fix was to just set the date correctly on his PC via the Date/Time control panel.