Going directly to a protected page doesn't work

I have a problem on one of my sites whereby if you try to go directly to the URL of a protected page, i.e. www.mywebsite.com/protected/page.php, it will take you to the login page as it should, you login but then you get the unsuccessful login page I've set up, i.e. access-denied.php. As long as you're already logged in though and you try to access the page, it will load no problem. I've checked the settings on the login page and have both "Pass original querystring on redirect" and "Go to previous URL(if it exists)" checked. I want to be able to email users with a direct link to certain pages but instead I have to just give them the link to the login page and then tell them to go to the specific page, which isn't ideal. Any idea what might be causing this?

If you post the URL and a username and password for me to test then I'll look into it. I haven't seen that happen before, so I'd have to debug it to figure out why this happens.

That would be great thanks - details in PM section.

It looks like when you applied restrict access to page to the pages, you specified the failed redirect to go to the page: access-denied.php

Then that page has restrict access to page set to go to the login page.

That means that the last page restricted was the access-denied.php page, and therefor that is the page it sends them back to.

You need to update the restrict access to page on the products.php page to take them to the login.php page directly on failure. Then it will return them to that page properly after login.

That's exactly what was wrong, working now thanks!