6.1.4 Mailserver. Reading mail?

[Overt]

Hi,

Have mail sending/receiving from isp through wingate (192.168.0.1) test account. Can see mail accumulating for users. One user getting error message "The POP server does not appear to conform to the POP3 protocol. Unable to parse the TOP listing."

User has Mailwasher pointing to receive mail from 192.168.0.1 but gets above error. When pointed to ISP mail is downloaded and screened prior to outlook but error arising with internal. Any ideas appreciated.

[adrien]

Hi

can you turn on debug logging for the POP3 server in WinGate, and send us through the log entries relating to when this happens?

Haven't tested MailWasher before. It's possible that it is getting some part of a message that makes it choke, we get Outlook choking on some mails quite frequently, but have always put it down to bugs in Outlook.

Adrien

[Nev]

Hi

can you turn on debug logging for the POP3 server in WinGate, and send us through the log entries relating to when this happens?

Haven't tested MailWasher before. It's possible that it is getting some part of a message that makes it choke, we get Outlook choking on some mails quite frequently, but have always put it down to bugs in Outlook.

Adrien

Hmmm this is an old one with Mailwasher here methinks.

[adrien]

Hmmmm ok

Do you know whether the file/mail contains any line with a bare '.' on it?

When SMTP clients send mail to a mail server they are supposed to escape such bare dots, since that normally indicates the end of the message, which would cause problems for anything parsing not only the response to TOP, but also RETR.

This could include pretty much any mail client.

The SMTP spec isn't clear on what an SMTP server should do when a client tries to send it such a mail, either reject it (which would mean you'd have to get the mail sender fixed) or fix the problem. I'll have another look, since we are starting to see other forms of non-conformity of mail coming through as well, which can cause problems for clients (like bare linefeeds in mail as well - the spec is even less helpful on what to do with those).

Adrien

[Overt]

Thanks Adrien & Nev.

Another anti-spam package (SpamEater) reads same mail from internal mail server (192.168.0.1) successfully leading me to believe the issue may be specific to Mailwasher as it fails on same task for same user.

Will post debug log section & look at file/mail structure shortly.

[Overt]

Update

With a little help from our friends at Mailwasher Forum (http://www.castlecops.com/p817226-POP_s ... tml#817226) we seem to have a resolution at this end. Using the TOOLS>ACCOUNTS>PROPERTIES>INCOMINGMAIL>ADVANCED ..>INTEROPERABILITY toggled on we are now live once again with Mailwasher as an antispam solution. It works well. However, there may be an underlying issue to resolve overall. I missed that option which you guys had already built in.

Thanks again Adrien and Nev. Seems, I have another positive resolution .. brilliant stuff!!

[Sunny Days]

Great stuff. And I found my old login as well.

[adrien]

cool

I made some changes to the mail handling to fix this issue as well, since it also affects Outlook when using POP3. Now WinGate fixes the dot escaping for incoming mail.

Chose this avenue since there are a number of SMTP server implementations out there that wrap lines of mail at a fixed length, and some of these don't then escape any dots that may end up starting a line. In this way they effectively break the emails. If we then rejected these, it would just cause problems. So better and more robust to fix the escaping I think.

Cheers

Adrien

[Sunny Days]

Sounds good Adrien. Always better to close the gate before rather than after the horse has bolted!!

Will you be issuing a new version or should we download again and do a fresh install??

Thanks again for great support.

[adrien]

THis will be in the next release. Planning to put out another maintenance release soon.

Adrien