cordless phone wireless interference caused by ?

[...sniped...]

You've provided the answer already. Because the wired phone was down at the same time, the failure had nothing to do with the wireless network. If the cordless phones and Wi-Fi were interfering, the wired fax machine would have continued to work. The data you've provided strongly suggests the phone line was down.

Did you call while the line was down (from a different line, of course)? If you called when it was working, there was little they can do.

If it happens again, you can do a quick test by turning off the Wi-Fi network. If the phones don't come back up, you've proved the Wi-Fi has nothing to do with it.

-Gary

While wireless devices may interfere with each other, they shouldn't have much effect on wired phones or fax. As for proving the point, simply turn off all the wireless equipment for a few minutes. Also, do you have a PBX? Or direct connection to the phone company? Do you have a demarc point, where you can plug in a phone to verify the line is working?

Thanks James, Gary

I may try that today when I go in though turning anything off seems to provoke an anxiety there about not having "communications". The phones going out really caused problems as well as blame. We have no PBX nor a direct line to the phone company. Not aware of any demark point. We tried a corded phone in the wall jacks and that didn't work either which told me that it was the line, not the WiFi. It's a very small 2 person office. The fax is a corded unit and that had no dialtone (obvious to me it wasn't a wireless problem).

If things work today (with both wireless and the cordless phones) I'll assume that I'm right that it's the phone company not anything I hooked up. If they don't, well it's deduction/troubleshooting time.

Karen

You either have a PBX or direct line to to the phone company. There's no other way, unless you're using VoIP. A demarc point is usually located near where the phone line enters the building. It will have a pair of jacks, one facing the CO and the other, your premise wiring. One other possibility, is that some device has failed or "off hook". What happens, if you try dialing in? If you hear ringing, there's likely a fault, that opens the pair to your office. If you get a busy signal, it's either a short on your line or a phone or fax that's off hook. The phone company should be able to do a line test.

This is where demarc points come in handy. They allow you to point the finger in the right direction.

You may be right, it may have been a phone line issue, especially (as was already mentioned) the wired fax machine didn't work either. Did you unplug the cordless telephone base stations from the phone line when testing the line with the fax machine. Doing that would eliminate any issues about interference from your wireless network to your cordless phones. If it doesn't work then, it's a telco problem.

I run a wireless network here at home and wireless telephones, too. I can tell you from experience that my 802.11b access point certainly does interfere with my 2.4 GHz cordless phone (or it did.) I replaced the phones with one of the true 5.4 GHz models and by doing so moved to a different frequency. That solved the problem and got me a phone system which allows me to transfer calls from handset to handset and to call other cordless handsets like an intercom. Loss of communications with the base station was one of the issues I found. And, not getting a dial-tone would be one of the symptoms someone not technically inclined might report. The phone should have said "out of range" if that happened though. Did it? Or did someone look?

What is the frequency that your existing cordless telephones use (900 MHz,

2.5 GHz, 5.4 GHz)? And are you using 802.11b or the newer 5.4 GHz wireless gear? If the frequencies are on different bands, you shouldn't have any issues whatsoever.

Good luck on getting things solved.

And remember that just because wireless is the cool new technology does not make it better than good old fashioned, fast, reliable, low-overhead, secure, Ethernet. If you're in a building with other offices, you might have experienced interference from an office nearby. Wireless access points and telephones don't always play together nicely.

Rick

Thanks James, Rick,

The cordless "problem" wasn't. It was the phone company as all is working fine now. Well not fine (will mention below). The phones btw are 900 MHz (cheapies). It's a direct connection but since the problem didn't occur again I'm assuming that it's the phone company working on the lines. fwiw I'm running 802.11b with WEP and other than the Thunderbird client that I migrated the mail to (I need to separate for a few days the "new" cable email from the old dialup account) things are good.

Since setting up Thunderbird as the new email client I'm continually getting the message "Sending of password did not succeed. Mail server optonline.net responded: Authentication failed"

I checked online and all of the passwords are correct. I did not set up the account to require authentication for smtp. The username that I have in the account is the primary, not one of the sub account email addresses. When I start up Thunderbird it just goes after the pop and produces the above error message. Emailing this machine from the other computer (with my account on Optiononline) all works fine. It's just when it tries to get email from the optonline "pop" that the problem arises. Any ideas? I'm also going to post this to a mozilla NG to see if anyone there has any ideas. It's a bit maddening and I've been told that Optimum doesn't support Mozilla products. An email to them (from my working account) came back telling me to go to their website.

Anyway, thanks a lot for all of the help here.

Karen

One thing you can do, is run Ethereal, to see what's happening on the network. Compare that system, with another that works.

Ethereal is a free download and is available for Linux and Windows.

Most ISPs do not require authentication on their SMTP servers, so I think your settings are right for your outbound mail. Some do require pop access prior to doing an SMTP send, though.

I am guessing that the password and user should be (based on your ISP's web site) sent in plain-text, so make sure that you don't have any of the secure authentication boxes checked in Thunderbird.

Are you sure that you are using the correct password for the account are trying to access? Is is set for plain text? Are the passwords different for the different email boxes (they should be)?

POP3 is pretty standard. Thunderbird should work. I've used it on lots of POP3 mailboxes.

You are sure that you are routing your POP3 traffic out on the cable connection and not the dial-up connection? (The POP3 should still work either way, but the SMTP will fail.)

Rick Kunath

Rick, James,

I checked the password (it only asks once for Thunderbird) and it is fine. Unfortunately they insist on using the same psw for all 4 accounts as they lean towards "simplicity". The problem happens when I open the app and it's apparently only a POP3 problem. The POP account is set for mail.optonline.net (but is set for the ATT dialup in Mozilla Mail and wonder if that's interfering). It also was looking for the SMTP of att.net which I believe I fixed. I'll check the plain text but think that was also modified. The secure authentication boxes are unchecked.

The strange thing is that on the machine I use (with only one email account) Thunderbird works fine both sending and receiving. I made the settings identical, with the exception of the psw which I wanted to be different. The psw and username is that of the primary email account. I rechecked on the Optimum site to make sure all was OK.

Unfortunately I'm not that familiar with Ethereal even though I installed it a while back on my home laptop. I'll use it as a last resort as I'm not sure they will look at "learning" it as a paid job function (go figure!). I never had the need for protocol analysis during my brief time as a network admin (mostly Novell years ago).

Anyway, thanks

Karen

What happens if you do a manual POP3 mail retrieval on the affected account, after the initial startup? Does it still fail?

It shouldn't.

Do you have separate email accounts setup in Thunderbird, or are you attempting to merge all of them? I've used up to 4 separate email accounts with Thunderbird, 3 POP3 and one IMAP, with no interaction issues at all. You can specify POP3/IMAP and SMTP settings on a per account basis, and use separate folders for each account.

Cable or dial-up ISP?

Different why? Because of the dial-up vs. cable ISP?

Is this machine doing dial-up and cable routing of traffic?

Rick

Rick,

A manual POP retrieval also fails with an "authentication" problem. I removed the automatic d/l and the problem still occurs. What is strange is that sometimes it works but only with one account (which is not the primary). I set up one of the problem accounts on the machine I use (also Thunderbird) and it works fine. Checked web-mail and there is nothing "clogging" the account.

Thunderbird is set up for four different accounts. I started thinking late yesterday that it might have been cause by the "import" of all of the email from Mozilla Mail. All of the .slt account folders have an ATT string as their name. Something might have been imported (like the account access information) that wasn't intended. Perhaps the migration might be for an identical provider but I'm unsure of which file contains that data so will probably have to do a manual copy/paste of the folders once I manually set up the accounts. Hopefully this will work. Optimum support was useless (as expected).

The machine I use is cable only. No dial up was ever configured. My psw was different well, because I wanted it to be :) I'm pretty fanatical about security on my home XP laptop (the Mac I usually don't worry too much about) and think it horrendous that the "keys to the kingdom" at work is protected by only one password.

The other machine does both dial-up and cable routing, but not concurrently. I think though that it's the "import" that is causing the problem and the directory names hint at that. I'll know later on.

Sorry that this in part is so off topic.

Karen

I suspect that you'll have everything working again as soon as you delete the existing mailbox folders and re-create the accounts from scratch in Thunderbird. You'll want to make sure that you set T-Bird to use separate folders for the various accounts if you intend to keep mail separated and easily control the from address and sending account.

I've been doing just what you are trying to accomplish successfully with Thunderbird.

Rick Kunath

Rick,

Thank you and to all who assisted me with this. I saw that the folder names inside the .sit file reflected the carrier and this meant that the "import" was only applicable if there were no changes with it. Recreated the accounts manually, copied/pasted the folders from MozMail to Thunderbird (which had cable POP/SMTP) and all seems well. The only problem seems to be a "glitch" (maybe not) in Thunderbird that doesn't retrieve all of the accounts (just the first on the list) when the "Get Mail" icon is clicked. That's easily overcome though by clicking the "Get All Messages".

Karen

Karen wrote: The only

I think this action works like this:

"Get Mail" will get the mail for the account currently highlighted. (I'll bet the first is, right?)

"Get All Messages" queries all accounts for new mail.

It is handy to have this set this way if you use multiple mailboxes and don't want to download all messages from all of them.

You can set an option to automatically check an account for new mail on Thunderbird startup per-account, and enable interval mail checking on a per-account basis if needed.

Rick Kunath