[Users] can send but not reply from claws in comcast.net account

[George Avrunin]

On Mon, 13 May 2024 10:55:22 +0200
Michael Schwendt <bugs.michael at gmx.net> wrote:

> The more important config files with regard to the symptoms you've
> described would be "accountrc" and "passwordstorerc". I assume that either
> you've had a wrong/old password in your account settings somewhere about
> "sending" email via the server that is responsible for sending and may be
> different from the one responsible for "receiving" messages from your
> postbox. You could run diff on both the old and new config files to figure
> out the difference/s.
> 
> In either case, there has not been a Fedora update that would cause such
> symptoms.

Yes, once I got the new setup working I did run diff (actually kdiff3) on the
configuration files for the working and non-working installations and I didn't
see anything that would have caused this, especially in the accountrc files.
(Obviously there were differences in the history files and the imapcache,
etc. so I didn't look at those.)  

And I don't understand why authentication for sending a non-reply message
(which I could do) would be different from sending a reply from the same
account through the same smtp server (where I got the authentication error
messages); I would assume they would do authentication the same way, although I
have not looked at the actual code to see if that's true. So I'd be
inclined to rule out a password problem.  (Unless replying tries to use some
cached authentication information? The problem occurred even when replying to
messages that had been read several hours or even days earlier and when I'd
quit and restarted Claws Mail between reading the message and trying to reply.)

I also checked the Fedora updates for the few days before the problem arose
and agree with you that it didn't seem to be caused by an update.  I saw
nothing that looked like it was related to this kind of authentication.  And,
of course, the new Claws Mail setup works without downgrading any Fedora rpms.
 
So I don't have any idea what caused the problem (which persists with the old
Claws Mail setup, at least when I was switching back and forth between the old
and new ones to check yesterday).  It's possible that someone who understands
the Claws Mail code could figure it out, but I don't have the knowledge
required to do that and it probably wouldn't be worth the effort for those who
do.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who replied for your thoughts about this.