Poping down an eircom.net e-mail issues...

eoinok

I was wondering has anyone come across this issue?
We have had a few users switch from eircom (ISDN & PSTN) to us. We are using a Smart metro link for our internet pipe. When the users try to pop down their e-mail, they get a "POP3 server timed out, Error: 0x800CCC19".
Read about it and there was a mention about MTU sizes.... packets getting fragmented etc.
I know of a colleague of mine who had the same issue with poping e-mail and he also found that users couldn;t get onto aib online banking if they were having problems with fragmenting. Our users are having no problems getting to to aib banking so it is not an packet fragmenting issue.

Anyone got any idea's as to what else it could be??

irlrobins

Have you tried adjusting MTU to see if that fixes? Sometimes some sites will work and others not with an MTU problem.

Can you telnet to pop3 server on port 110 to make sure that connectivity can occur at all?

eoinok

irlrobins, that was the 1st thing I thought of... the previously mentioned colleague was able to adjust the MTU in the IP tracking table to make it work.

Thing here is though, the "MTU problem" can also be indentified by not being able to get to aib's 24hr banking login section. One of the guys I rang who is having the issue, I asked him to do this and he had no issues getting to aib's banking site so I dont think it may be an MTU issue???

Is there anyway that eircom could be blocking pop'ing of these accounts from non eircom networks though that would seem ridiculous for obvious reasons?
One thing though is that two of the guys were ISDN business customers, and the 3rd was on an Eircom dialup business user thingy of some sort as in pay X amount for some many peak/off peak hours of online etc. Anyway that these mail accounts would be tied into thier subscription packages and only allowed access from an Eircom network?

I should also add that they can all get to their account via webmail.

irlrobins

Be the first I've heard of Eircom blocking access to pop servers from non customer ip addresses. I know they block access to smtp servers from non eircom ip address but that's standard OP to prevent spam mail relaying.

Access via webmail is very different from accessing POP3 server so unfortunately doesn't aid in diagnosing the problem. It's an odd one alright.

Might be worthwhile posting a link to this thread in Computers/Technology section for a bigger audience. This isn't strictly a BB issue so should be ok to do so.

eoinok

irlrobbins, got to the nub of this, it was a reverse DNS issue.....
We have two /24's and our ISP was forwards on requests for one /24 to our DNS server for resolution and were doing nothing with the other /24!!
It seems that eircom's mail server like to do a rDNS lookup on the IP before they will respond.
It is the /24 range that our ISP was doing othing with was causing the trouble, hence how we had some customers with the issue, and other without.

Cheers for the help.

irlrobins

Ah cool. Good to hear all sorted.

MunsterCycling

Hmm not really as all the mail that was read in €ircons webmail interface is now no longer available via pop. Problem is with Eircom and they have no intentions of fixing it as I was told to use mail2web.com to get around this :rolleyes:

Foxwood

MunsterCycling wrote:

Hmm not really as all the mail that was read in €ircons webmail interface is now no longer available via pop. Problem is with Eircom and they have no intentions of fixing it as I was told to use mail2web.com to get around this :rolleyes:

The eircom webmail interface essentially POPs your mail out of the POP server, into the webmail server. That makes sense from the point of view of people who use webmail instead of a mail client, but it's a pain for people who want to check their mail when their away from their PC.

If you really want a copy of those mails in your desktop mail client, your best bet is to forward them as an attachment from the webmail interface. Using Outlook Express, I was able to drag the attachments into my OE mailbox.

Alun

If you use Thunderbird, or another mail client that stores mails as simple text files, you can even take the forwarded mails and edit them to make them look like 'normal' mails that were never forwarded. Easy enough for a few mails, but a bit of a PITA for lots of them. I guess you could write a script to automate the process if you were so inclined.

Foxwood

Alun wrote:

If you use Thunderbird, or another mail client that stores mails as simple text files, you can even take the forwarded mails and edit them to make them look like 'normal' mails that were never forwarded. Easy enough for a few mails, but a bit of a PITA for lots of them. I guess you could write a script to automate the process if you were so inclined.

If you forward them as attachments, you don't need to edit anything - the attachment isn't edited, and doesn't have >> at the start of each line. It even has the original headers intact.

Alun

Foxwood wrote:

If you forward them as attachments, you don't need to edit anything - the attachment isn't edited, and doesn't have >> at the start of each line. It even has the original headers intact.

Yeah, but they still appear in your folders as Fwd: <subject> and the From: and To: fields are "wrong". What I was suggesting was to edit away the header information added by the forwarding action, so that the email looked just as it would if the email had been sent/received by the email client.

Also using Thunderbird you can't drag the attachments into a folder like you apaprently can with OE.

Foxwood

Alun wrote:

Yeah, but they still appear in your folders as Fwd: <subject> and the From: and To: fields are "wrong". What I was suggesting was to edit away the header information added by the forwarding action, so that the email looked just as it would if the email had been sent/received by the email client.

Also using Thunderbird you can't drag the attachments into a folder like you apaprently can with OE.

It sounds like TB is still seriously lacking in basic functionality, then. But that's not a big deal, as the number of TB users is pretty small - it's certainly not making the kind of inroads that FF is.

You could always use OE to download the forwarded attachments, move the attachments into a folder, and then import them from OE into TB if TB won't do the job properly on its own.