Why do I have to log into hotmail twice?

Question

I just recently noticed I have to attempt a login into hotmail twice before it succeeds. Although I'm using Google Chrome (3.0.195.21), the symptoms are well described in a Mozilla thread. In short, I'm told:

The e-mail address or password is incorrect. Please try again.

The thread on mozilla's site that supposed to describe the latest details (and the 1st hit on google when I search for "hotmail login twice") requires an account to read so I'm hoping someone here has a good synopsis of what the cause is.

I normally start at hotmail.com, which redirects to login.live.com/.... I can login by starting at mail.live.com, using IE8 or attempting a 2nd login. Oddly, if I start at login.live.com Chrome tells me there is a redirect loop.

Does anyone know or have a public link to the root cause of the double login?

(it is a hotmail account I'm login into)

EDIT - Caused by my 'restricting how 3rd parties can use cookies'. If I allow all cookies, it works first time.

Solution 1

It is because they are skating around the edge of the cross-site scripting safeguards in your browser and some of what is being done are tripping them.

The core problem is that there are multiple domains involved with logging into and accessing a HotMail account and all of them need you to be authenticated. Since cookies need common domain names to transfer between sites, this is part of the solution, but involving a completely different domain scotches that, so they do other tricks (including redirects) in an effort to make it all work.

I see this problem in Opera with Ebay, PayPal, Google Mail and recently YouTube, so it's not a purely HotMail thing. And the Opera fora have posts about it happening in other sits, too. Then too, Chrome (and Opera) have quite low percentages of browser share, so sites that do this would tend to target IE and FireFox first.

Solution 2

Apparently if you click sign out after viewing your email, instead of just navigating away from the page, it shouldn't happen again, but you will have to delete your cookies for their domain once to fix it (Chrome: Options -> "Under the hood" -> Privacy -> Cookies -> Show all cookies -> remove hotmail.com cookies). The bug has been around for quite a while, check out this Mac OS X hints article.

Comments

[Tony Lee]

My apologies, but in my defense, my hotmail account is the throw away one for all those things that insist I give them an email account.

[Tony Lee]

Still happens when I sign out. Still happens when I clear the cookies. I know I cleared the cookies because it lost my "remembered email" account and I had to relog into SU. This has never happened when I start at mail.live.com so even if cookies are involved, it's not the whole story.

[John T]

what version of chrome are you using?

[John T]

so updating seems to have solved your problem? Let me know so I can improve my answer.

[Tony Lee]

It's still reproducible at home with 3.0.195.21

[Tony Lee]

This is my theory as well so I'm marking it as the correct answer. I think load balancing is causing the random behavior of working and not working. On first try, I get redirected to a different server from the one I sent the auth to, it fails because it can't access a cookie but works the second time because that's the server I'm supposed to go to.