All Email Heads Into SquirrelMail... Can't Download to Outlook

[open4biz]

Greetings,

I had issues with my new DA setup this week. The latest issue is that all of my email now dumps into SquirrelMail.

What I am trying to do is keep it on the server until I connect with Outlook. I want SquirrelMail there, as a backup for when I leave town. But primarily, I want to use Outlook locally.

Earlier today, I had to restart vm-pop3d to be able to send mail, using "service vm-pop3d start"

I also followed the directions from this thread:

http://www.directadmin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=29779

I ran "sh set_permissions.sh all" and also tried these commands:

# chown -R mail:mail /var/spool/exim/input
# chown -R mail:mail /var/spool/exim/db
# chown -R mail:mail /var/spool/exim/msglog

I don't know if I helped or hurt anything.

Well, I look forward to any help this forum may offer.

Thanks!

Ansel

 

[open4biz]

Also, in related news: I can't send email via SMTP from Outlook either. This is driving me nuts. Are there some tricks I could use to solve that issue, too?

Thanks,

Ansel

 

[open4biz]

I check the system mail log and I noticed this:

"Mar 26 00:39:17 anseltaft vm-pop3d[2930]: User '[email protected]' logged in from 70.181.223.151, nmsgs=0
Mar 26 00:39:17 anseltaft vm-pop3d[2930]: Session ended for user: '[email protected]' from 70.181.223.151, nmsgs=0, ndel=0
Mar 26 00:58:16 anseltaft vm-pop3d[2931]: User '[email protected]' logged in from 70.181.223.151, nmsgs=0
Mar 26 00:58:16 anseltaft vm-pop3d[2931]: Session ended for user: '[email protected]' from 70.181.223.151, nmsgs=0, ndel=0
Mar 26 00:58:35 anseltaft vm-pop3d[2932]: User '[email protected]' logged in from 70.181.223.151, nmsgs=0
Mar 26 00:58:35 anseltaft vm-pop3d[2932]: Session ended for user: '[email protected]' from 70.181.223.151, nmsgs=0, ndel=0
Mar 26 01:09:03 anseltaft vm-pop3d[2933]: User '[email protected]' logged in from 70.181.223.151, nmsgs=0
Mar 26 01:09:03 anseltaft vm-pop3d[2933]: Session ended for user: '[email protected]' from 70.181.223.151, nmsgs=0, ndel=0"

Notice that it says I have no new messages... but IMAP SquirrelMail has over 100 sitting there! Why is vm-pop3d having a hard time finding my email box? And where *is* my email box and how do I map vm-pop3d to it?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Ansel

 

[floyd]

The latest issue is that all of my email now dumps into SquirrelMail

No Squirrelmail is just a mail client like Outlook. It reads your mailbox. Nothing ever gets "sent" to Squirrelmail.

# chown -R mail:mail /var/spool/exim/input
# chown -R mail:mail /var/spool/exim/db
# chown -R mail:mail /var/spool/exim/msglog

However this has nothing to do with your mailbox.

If you really are supposed to be running vm-pop3d and not dovecot then your system mail will be in /var/spool/mail and your virtual mailboxes in /var/spool/virtual

You need to check the permissions for /var/spool/virtual/anseltaft.com/me

 

[open4biz]

No Squirrelmail is just a mail client like Outlook. It reads your mailbox. Nothing ever gets "sent" to Squirrelmail.

However this has nothing to do with your mailbox.

If you really are supposed to be running vm-pop3d and not dovecot then your system mail will be in /var/spool/mail and your virtual mailboxes in /var/spool/virtual

You need to check the permissions for /var/spool/virtual/anseltaft.com/me

Hi Floyd - You are totally correct. Thank you for the note. Dovecot is installed and running, so I inadvertantly doubled-down on my POP/SMTP software. I have now stopped the VM-POP3D service (and allowing Dovecot to do it's good work).

So what do I do next to have the email go to the expected account with [email protected] or my other domains' email addresses?

And lastly, why can't I connect to my server via SMTP and send email. That part's equally as frustrating!

Thank you in advance!

-Ansel

 

[scsi]

Your internet provider is probably blocking port 25 to send email. Try using port 587 instead.

 

[open4biz]

Well, that's weird. It worked, I was able to send two trial emails, but I never had to use that port before.

So, now I can send email. But now Outlook hiccups trying to log in to pull email. I get an error saying Outlook cannot connect to my incoming (POP3) email server. Is that related to Dovecot or Exim?

Is there a log someone would like to see to help narrow the issue?

EDIT: I tried to SSH to port 110 and the connection was refused. I am running CSF as my firewall, but port 110 (and 25) are allowed. Does that mean there needs to be a service running behind the port that I need to start or activate? Here are my current services from DirectAdmin:

directadmin directadmin (pid 2440 7012 9949 9950 13326 13329 )
dovecot dovecot (pid 2155 )
exim exim (pid 2454 13330 )
httpd httpd (pid 3269 3271 3272 3273 3274 3275 3279 3643 3647 3648 3651 3652 3655 3656 )
lfd lfd (pid 2499 )
mysqld mysqld (pid 2262 2263 2264 2265 2266 2267 2271 2272 2273 2274 3641 3642 3644 3645 3646 )
named named (pid 2711 )
proftpd proftpd (pid 2538 )
sshd sshd (pid 2219 )

Thank you in advance for any help. )

 

[open4biz]

Well this is interesting: it looks like ports 25 and 110 are not open despite being listed as open by the CSF firewall. Could this NMap dump just mean that there's no service behind the port, so it's not showing as open?

Starting Nmap 4.76 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2009-03-26 13:35 Pacific Daylight Time

Initiating Ping Scan at 13:35

Scanning xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx [5 ports]

Completed Ping Scan at 13:35, 0.08s elapsed (1 total hosts)

Initiating Parallel DNS resolution of 1 host. at 13:35

Completed Parallel DNS resolution of 1 host. at 13:35, 0.63s elapsed

Initiating SYN Stealth Scan at 13:35

Scanning blah.blah.blah (72.233.14.230) [1000 ports]

Discovered open port 80/tcp on 72.233.14.230

Discovered open port 21/tcp on 72.233.14.230

Discovered open port 143/tcp on 72.233.14.230

Discovered open port 587/tcp on 72.233.14.230

Completed SYN Stealth Scan at 13:35, 4.28s elapsed (1000 total ports)

Initiating Service scan at 13:35

Scanning 10 services on blah.blah.blah (72.233.14.230)

Completed Service scan at 13:36, 19.88s elapsed (10 services on 1 host)

PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION

21/tcp open ftp ProFTPD 1.3.1

80/tcp open http Apache httpd 2

|_ HTML title: Site doesn't have a title.

110/tcp closed pop3

143/tcp open imap Dovecot DirectAdmin imapd

587/tcp open smtp Exim smtpd 4.67

 

[open4biz]

Oh good lord. I discovered my dovecot.conf file did not include 'pop3' in it's list. It even had the pop3s derivative listed... but no pop3. Amazing. Who set this server up?!?

Anyway, I just ran:

netstat -tulpn | grep :110

To which this came back:

tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:110 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 19733/dovecot

But now my Outlook email just haaaaaangs when I go to try and pull my email. SquirrelMail, that hardy little bugger, is having no issue, whatsoever.

Any thoughts?

 

[open4biz]

Hmmmm... I read about manually connecting and testing Dovecot. Here are the results:

telnet localhost pop3
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1).
Escape character is '^]'.
+OK Dovecot DA ready.
USER <OMITTED>
+OK
PASS <OMITTED>
+OK Logged in.
LIST
+OK 47 messages:
1 56295
2 4633
3 3351
4 142141
5 126434
6 139831
7 9092
8 22780
9 11708
10 30644
11 19618
12 33838
13 76486
14 5628
15 7157
16 28646
17 16252
18 9414
19 96784
20 15555
21 13940
22 83440
23 18542
24 31710
25 12129
26 18831
27 42710
28 5328
29 12232
30 7842
31 23377
32 3087
33 64218
34 142525
35 3112
36 34079
37 25984
38 67843
39 13305
40 23058
41 25447
42 7040
43 14422
44 5748
45 12113
46 43747
47 2298
.

And that's correct... I have 47 messages... so what's with Outlook hanging??

Thanks,

Ansel

 

[open4biz]

Well well well - I fixed the damn thing!!!!

Here's what I did: while looking at the maillog, I noticed a lot of unknown user access attempts. So I read up on it and fixed it with this:

http://help.directadmin.com/item.php?id=175

Then, while I was in the dovecot.conf file, I noticed this item:

# Workarounds for various client bugs:
# outlook-no-nuls:
# Outlook and Outlook Express hang if mails contain NUL characters.
# This setting replaces them with 0x80 character.
# oe-ns-eoh:
# Outlook Express and Netscape Mail breaks if end of headers-line is
# missing. This option simply sends it if it's missing.
}

So I added

outlook-no-nuls

Just above the } at the bottom of the work-around section.

Viola!

The farking thing works!!!

And that was a lot of troubleshooting and research. I hope this helps someone!!

-Ansel