Forums & Blog

I am a new SM user, an admin, a little web and email ISP for about 60 companies.
I've been using Imail for 10 years or so and just switched to SM for a number of reasons.
At any rate, I feel like I know what I'm doing.
But d*mn if I can get POP working.
The web interface is working fine.
SMTP is working fine.
Users and see and send mail through the web interface fine.
But Outlook nor Eudora will POP this sucker.
This is probably something that happened moving the mail server from Imail, but not directly related to Imail since that had been working fine.
This is set up on a new server (new computer).
Again, everything is working fine, but nobody can POP. And that's a deal killer since 80% of my users use POP to grab email off the server.

Does anyone have a suggestion of what to look at or look for?

Simple test, but might provide some answers, can you telnet to port 110 on the mail server? Maybe a firewall or other software blocking access? When telnet-ing you should get a reply like "+OK POP3 server ready". Do you have detailed POP logging on? Any errors in the logs?

Great question, I do not have any firewall on this port (having removed it all to test this installation). telnet does in fact show the server ready - in fact SM support said "hey, we can telnet, so it must be working!"...)

re: logs... good question, I looked last night and had some junk in there, let me check...

ok, the entries look like this:

00:39:37 [208.48.63.31][4924] connected at 1/2/2007 12:39:37 AM
00:39:37 [208.48.63.31][4924] CAPA
00:39:37 [208.48.63.31][4924] USER leitz
00:39:37 [208.48.63.31][4924] PASS XXXX
00:39:37 [208.48.63.31][4924] leitz logged in
00:39:38 [208.48.63.31][4924] STAT
00:39:38 [208.48.63.31][4924] +OK 12 49647
00:39:38 [208.48.63.31][4924] UIDL
00:39:38 [208.48.63.31][4924] uidl list given for 12 messages
00:39:38 [208.48.63.31][4924] LIST 1
00:39:38 [208.48.63.31][4924] list completed for message 1
00:39:38 [208.48.63.31][4924] RETR 1
00:39:38 [208.48.63.31][4924] retr completed for message 1
00:44:38 [208.48.63.31][4924] disconnected at 1/2/2007 12:44:38 AM

I get the count, but not the download.

Most likely there is a firewall or anti-virus program interfering with the POP traffic. Try disabling any such process/device/service and see if that lets POP work.

 

As I said in the last post, there is no firewall, that's not the issue. In fact, since the last post, I deleted one of my user domains, recreated one of the users, they were able to POP their mail later and download 9 messages, now they're hanging again (Outlook on their end sees a server timeout) just like me and everybody else I have trying to POP their email. So far the only thing support has suggested is changing the NIC (which I'm about to try for lack of any other ideas).

Ok sports fans, get this, after support suggested changing the NIC (and I thought that was the stupidest idea I ever heard) I installed a Linksys LNE100TX and now POP causes the system to reset! :-) (Happy New Year! - can you tell I'm getting punchy?)(I'm not kidding, the system will sit there doing normal net stuff then, WHAM, somebody (like me) will POP the server, and messages actually start to download for a second, then the server bugchecks! (windows 2000). This gives a whole new meaning to POP. So - with all the driver/NIC card advanced settings enabling wake-on-lan (etc etc) DISABLED, anybody got a clue why this would happen? This is after downloading and installing the latest driver from Linksys, too. Or do I need to keep throwing new LAN cards at it until it behaves? Maybe I can find an old old old one without any special "features" on it and then POP won't eat my server.

Ok, POP is now working for me.
If you're gagging over a similar installation from h#&& where POP seems to be not working (or worse, causing your server to blow up), as stupid as it sounds, try a different NIC card, and NOT a Linksys LNE100TX. (This was on a Windows 2000 system with an AMD Sempron CPU on an Abit nf8 motherboard, so maybe this is just the wrong config for using the LNE100TX where it may work fine in another configuration.)

I ended up pulling the Linksys and installing a D-Link DGE-530T and now everything is stable.

Recap:
1) I started with an onboard ethernet NVIDIA nForce Networking Controller; POP wasn't working but everything else was;
2) I disabled the NVIDIA nForce Networking Controller and installed a Linsys LNE100TX wake-on-lan which then started to show some pop traffic while also causing the system to reboot within milliseconds of POP access (but curiously other network traffic did not set this off);
3) I disabled and removed the Linksys LNE100TX and installed a D-Link DGE-530T Gigabit Desktop Adapter (although I'm only running at 100MBs) and POP is now working correctly, the system is stable, no runs, no hits, no errors, SMTP and POP crusing right along.