Bad Credentials: The Email Server is Saying Exactly What it Means

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In Maximo development, we have a cursory knowledge of email systems and we don't support configuring or troubleshooting on the other side of the JavaMail API. However, occasionally we're asked about platform specific connectivity and, occasionally, credential problems, in particular:

 "javax.mail.AuthenticationFailedException Logon failure unknown user name or bad password."

We have yet to encounter a case other than this meaning exactly what is says.  It's a bad username/password error returned from email server to the JavaMail API.  The raw email server message and code would be visible with mail.debug enabled (and in some cases base64 credentials which can be decoded and examined).

With Exchange, we've seen this problem occur when customers are entering shortname@domain for the username, but the server wants shortname without the"@domain" part.

The only truly transparent way we've seen to test the email server connection and credentials is to connect directly to the email server from the application server host (where the Maximo listener is running) via telnet.