Topic: Receiving POP3 mail hosted on an E-Smith Server problem

[gobdob]

Hello,

I have a mail server hosting email for several companies.  Some individuals are having problems downloading their email to their POP3 client (ie. MS Outlook).  It seems to hang for some reason.  They can log into webmail no problem and access email just fine, but via Outlook it is very slow downloading the email.  At times, it times out after downloading a couple.  On one workstation, I totally rebuilt the MSOutlook mailbox, but it didn't resolve the problem...

I'm currently running E-Smith v 5.6 just hosting email and webmail access...

What could be the problem???

[boringgit]

Have you tried using IMAP?

Not a solution, but if all is fine on IMAP it may help in the elimination process...

Are the people who have problems all from the same company? If so it could indicate problems with their network, or perhaps common software - Some AV software acts as a POP3 proxy???

[gobdob]

Have you tried using IMAP?

No I have not tried.  I have multiple domains hosted by our mail server and so far I have only heard of two people having problems.  I think I can eliminate a network issue as they reside in different network.

How will testing it via IMAP eliminate the problem?  Do you think the server could be bogged down some how???  

We probably have about 60 mailboxes on it and most users of the system use a POP3 account via Outlook or Outlook Express to access their email.  The server is a robust Compaq server PIII 500 with 512 Mb Ram.  I think is suffice to run test w/o a problem, but I'm not sure.

Should I be looking to upgrade to Esmith v6.0?

flee

[boringgit]

Personally...

If it is only 2 of 60 users I would be looking more at software on their PCs.

Again, especially firewall and AV software that can intervene in the POP collection process.

Just an example, but if they both had Norton 2003, Norton maybe released an update to the mail proxy, both PCs exhibit the same timeout problem...

I would get them both to temporarily disable or remove any AV or Firewall. (Ideally from inside your network so they had some protection )

Spyware is also out of control recently. I had a guy come in with mail problems, but removing a tonne of spyware (using adaware, spybot, cwshredder and Hijack this), updating his AV and running Windows updates, solved the problem....

[gobdob]

Hey,

It looks like more and more emails accounts are experiencing the same thing.  Hanging or really slow when trying to download email from ESmith via POP3 on their local email account (ie. Outlook/Outlook Express).

As mentioned the system works just fine via webmail so the connection is not at fault...  I have attempted to read the logs, but not sure what to look for...  I know a reboot of the server didn't fix it neither...

Any ideas???