The thing I don't get is that if you can see your e-mails in VB, is it authenticating your password in the Hivemail DB?
No, it simply queries the HM DB for the count of new messages for the coresponding userid. There is no authentication going on.
Bit of a shame really, it wasnt overly hard to do the authentication... would have thought they would have done it themselves as that is what users expect.