POP3 Connector does not do its work

Hi.
SBS2008: POP3 Connector ends prematurely downloading mails after cca 5 mails
with bad headers.
Does anybody knows what to do?

First, move away from using the POP3 connector in Exchange. Have the
clients download their email into Outlook and store it on the Exchange
server.

Second, log in directly to the POP account and delete the emails
manually. I had this problem years ago and I had to go delete them
manually.

Dave

Do you have other mailboxes that are downloading normally with the POP
connector? Especially if the answer to that is yes, I agree with the idea
of logging into the POP account and deleting the corrupted e-mails. Another
idea is to open the connector properties and up the logging level on the
Troubleshooting tab. See if you get any more useful errors in the
Application log.

Sorry to say it but I disagree with letting Outlook pop the accounts
individually. If nothing else, it can easily be a management nightmare -
right now, you have a situation with a specific mailbox that came right to
your attention. If each user's Outlook profile were in charge of its own
mailbox, you'd never know of an error unless the user noticed and reported
it. And then it's not clear where to troubleshoot.

I have used the POP connector since SBS 4, and I've found it much more
reliable than a bunch of separately configured Outlook profiles. (I still
use it in addition to SMTP, for 2 old e-mail accounts at the ISP).

"Dave Nickason [SBS MVP]" wrote:

> Do you have other mailboxes that are downloading normally with the POP
> connector? Especially if the answer to that is yes, I agree with the idea
> of logging into the POP account and deleting the corrupted e-mails.

It can be the solution in rare cases. But if this I have to do every week
for every user mailbox it will be better to me to manually write down the
letters on the paper and send them vith carrier pingeon

> Another
> idea is to open the connector properties and up the logging level on the
> Troubleshooting tab. See if you get any more useful errors in the
> Application log.

I think the log appended describes that the problem is in bug in POP3
connector. It found problem in FROM address and instead of saving this mail
in BAD mail directory (or something else) or saving this mail in common
mailbox like did the connector in SBS2003 it reports error and does not
delete the mail from POP3 server. And when there is more than 5 mails of this
type, connector stop downloading next mails on POP server.

>
> Sorry to say it but I disagree with letting Outlook pop the accounts
> individually. If nothing else, it can easily be a management nightmare -
> right now, you have a situation with a specific mailbox that came right to
> your attention. If each user's Outlook profile were in charge of its own
> mailbox, you'd never know of an error unless the user noticed and reported
> it. And then it's not clear where to troubleshoot.
>
> I have used the POP connector since SBS 4, and I've found it much more
> reliable than a bunch of separately configured Outlook profiles. (I still
> use it in addition to SMTP, for 2 old e-mail accounts at the ISP).

Yes. I agree with this. This is the reason, why I still use the POP3
connector.

Thank you for answer but I have been awaiting some answer (from MS?) that
some patch or service pack can solve it. It looks like very stupid bug in
functionality.

Thanks
Vladimir

I would think it would be rare to have corrupted messages in the POP
mailbox - if you're having this every week, have you contacted the ISP to
see if you can find out the cause? As I said, I'm only popping two legacy
mailboxes, but I almost never get an error, and don't think I've ever had
one that caused the connector to actually fail.

It would be logical that the connector would not delete messages it could
not successfully download - if it's a corruption issue that's happening
prior to the connector's attempt to retrieve the message, it seems like
you're going to have to take that up with the ISP. (Or, as Dave suggested,
switch to SMTP mail, which would probably be the best choice if you can do
so).

Hello Vladimir,

Thanks for your post and Dave's good suggestions and valuable sharing.

This issue is caused by "Invalid Header Fields" that from the POP3 mailbox messages which is not consonant with the RFC standard, so that Exchange
server(not POP3 Connector any more) would not download the messages into corresponding Exchange account mailbox. For more detailed explanation
and suggestions, please refer to a previous similar post:

Hello Robbin

Thanks for your answer.
I think Dan Thompson did not understood the problem. So I will try to
describe it more detailed.
At first: both Exchange and POP3 connector are server applications and as
this these MUST do its work without helps like “today you have delete every
mail that has…� and �tomorrow you have repair mail that do not have…�

And now the problem:
I have one (or more) mailbox where many (or almost all) mails are spam. You
understand that it is very problematic to send notice to authors of these
spam that they contain some error in the header of his mails. So the POP3
connector must process all mail in POP mailbox in every case.

POP3 connector downloads one mail and tries to deliver it to Exchange server:
[t 0] 04/28/09, 15:19:46: Downloading message 4 of 500.
[t 0] 04/28/09, 15:19:46: (POP3) [TX] RETR 4
[t 0] 04/28/09, 15:19:46: (POP3) [RX] +OK 3230 octets follow.
[t 0] 04/28/09, 15:19:51: (SMTP) [RX] 250 2.0.0 Resetting
[t 0] 04/28/09, 15:19:51: Sending message 3 to the SMTP recipient
yyyyyyy@yyyyyyy.cz...

Exchange server look at the mail and find there is some problem (bad header):
[t 0] 04/28/09, 15:19:51: Error: never found closing angle bracket:
iksmb@xxxxxx.cz
[t 0] 04/28/09, 15:19:51: (SMTP) [TX] MAIL FROM: <VIAGRA . Official Site
<iksmb@xxxxxx.cz> RET=FULL
[t 0] 04/28/09, 15:19:56: (SMTP) [RX] 501 5.1.7 Invalid address

POP3 connector gets information from Exchange, that something is wrong:
[t 0] 04/28/09, 15:19:56: Failure hrResult (0x800ccc63) trying to deliver
message id 3:
[t 0] 04/28/09, 15:19:56: SMTPRESPONSE: * * * !Failed! * * *
[t 0] 04/28/09, 15:19:56: * * * * * *
[t 0] 04/28/09, 15:19:56: * * * 0x800ccc63 * * *
[t 0] 04/28/09, 15:19:56: Command: [SMTP_MAIL]
[t 0] 04/28/09, 15:19:56: Completed: Yes.
[t 0] 04/28/09, 15:19:56: IxpResult:
[t 0] 04/28/09, 15:19:56: ---> ---> ---> hrResult: 0x800ccc63
[t 0] 04/28/09, 15:19:56: pszResponse: 501 5.1.7 Invalid
address
[t 0] 04/28/09, 15:19:56: uiServerError: 501
[t 0] 04/28/09, 15:19:56: dwSocketError: 0
[t 0] 04/28/09, 15:19:56: pwszProblem: <none>

And POP3 connector continues downloading next mails:
[t 0] 04/28/09, 15:19:56: Error: The "MAIL FROM" address ("VIAGRA . Official
Site <iksmb@xxxxxx.cz", from header field "From") was rejected. Continuing.
[t 0] 04/28/09, 15:19:56: (SMTP) [TX] RSET
[t 0] 04/28/09, 15:19:56: Downloading message 5 of 500.

BUT here is the problem: POP3 connector does not know this type of error so
it does not copy the mail into BADMAIL directory nor delete it from POP
mailbox!!!
Probably due to it is awaiting good transmission at next download:
[t 0] 04/28/09, 15:20:26: EVENT: An error occurred while delivering mail to
'yyyyyyy@yyyyyyy.cz' on the SMTP server 'localhost'. The error code was
0x800ccc67. Verify that the mailbox exists and that the Exchange receive
connectors are configured properly.
[t 0] 04/28/09, 15:20:26: (AsyncConn[ localhost:25 ]) Connection to
'localhost' closed.

I think good solution was in previous SBS2003, where the POP3 Connector was
able to deliver undeliverable mail to one specific mailbox. This option was
rejected from SBS2008 however.
So I think there are some possibilities to repair this:
- POP3 Connector must deliver every message that he correctly downloads and
then he must delete it from POP mailbox
- Setup Exchange so the Exchange will receive all mails from POP3 Connector
- Or POP3 will understand the errors which returns Exchange and will react
correctly