Mail problems (POP3 & SMTP)

[peter_mcc]

hi

A POP3 account we were trying to collect mail from had an exclamation mark in the password - Cerb4 couldn't connect to the mailbox. I changed the password so it no longer had the exclamation mark and it worked straight away.

The slightly weird thing is that even though the "test" button failed, some of the messages from the POP3 inbox sometimes were collected. I can't work out why or how but sometimes it worked - mostly it didn't.

I can send messages ok (I've tested that) but when I use the "test" button in the SMTP section it says:
SMTP Connection Failed: The SMTP connection failed to start [l:0]: fsockopen returned Error Number 0 and Error String 'Failed to parse address "l"'

As I said, it seems to work for helpdesk messages, its just the test that fails.

regards
peter

[Hildy]

Well, diregarding the test failures (which are odd), do you have an external scheduled task hitting your /cron page? PHP being stateless, there needs to be an external impetus to the download and parse processes.

I've also asked our QA guy to take a look at the '!' thing and see if that's reproducible here.

[joegeck]

Hey Peter,

I did a quick test at home and didn't notice any real problems. My test account with the exclamation point password PASSED the Test button during setup and the couple of e-mail messages I threw at the account both were received by the Helpdesk. I realize that's not the most thorough fail test however so it may still be possible.

But I did get this PHP warning message in my browser under the success message.
"Notice: Unknown: Mailbox is empty (errflg=1) in Unknown on line 0"

I reported that to the developers here and they recommended you go into your php.ini file and turn off any warning and/or notice reporting. Search for "error_reporting" and try changing it to one of the less strict options.

See if that helps and then get back to us if it's still a problem.

Thanks Peter.

[peter_mcc]

Thanks Dan & Joe

It is all working now - I'm not sure why the errors appear in the Cerb4 Setup->mail servers section but, given that it actually works, I'll leave it all alone.

I'd rather not change the error logging for PHP generally - they are helpful for the other sites we run on the same server

regards
Peter

[Hildy]

You should be able to modify error_reporting and display_errors via ini_set(), and you could call those in framework.config.php.

Like you said, though, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. :-)