Failed POP3 Login

[ETPhHm]

This has actually been a problem with MWP6, but I see that it has also carried over to MWP2010.

If you have more than 4 email accounts which access the same POP3 server (I have 5), and all are included in the default mail check, you get an error message every time in the log view of MWP2010, and you get a "session encountered error" screen in MWP6. You don't get much detail on the error in MWP2010, but MWP6 says, "The connection was intentionally close by the server before the session was completed." If I disable the default mail check on one of the 5 in MWP6 the problem goes away and so I have been doing a manual check on the 5th mail account by itself. You can change the "check order" in MWP2010, and that does not eliminate the problem but it always shifts the problem to the 5th one in the list. Again I can disable one of the 5 in the default mail check and do it manually by itself. Understandably, this may be limitations of the mail server.

UPDATE: MWP2010 allows you to set the maximum number of accounts checked simultaneously under "Check Throttle" in the General settings, and if you set that to one less than the number of the account order list where the problem consistently occurs, then it seems to fix the problem. For example in my case, I have two different POP3 servers: one acount on one server and 5 accounts on the other. The problem always occurs with which ever account is the fifth one on the server that has 5 accounts. So if I put the 1 account that has its own seperate server at the top of the order, then the other 5 below it, then I can set the maximum simulataneous account checks to 5, and it will never check more than 4 accounts simultaneously on the problem server.

This is causing me to seriously consider purchasing the $10 upgrade for MWP2010, even though Nick promised lifetime upgrades. Nick really needs to change the product name so that his integrity will not be labelled as a man that goes back on his word.

[anniebrion]

Oops sorry I speed read your post.

*Edit*

If all the accounts are on the same server then I guess this is a number of connections issue and not a MWP fault.

I have over 5 accounts from my fasthosts server and I have no issue with the number of accounts being checked at a time.

[ETPhHm]

Try reading what I wrote...

[ETPhHm]

That makes sense annie. I'm just glad there is a little more flexibility to work around this in MWP2010, which isn't there in MWP6.

[anniebrion]

WMP6.5.4 only allowed ALL or 1 at a time, at least 2010 allows: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, ALL

[QuietOne]

Yeah, I think there may be a limitation put up by your server causing your checks to fail as I too have 5 accounts on one server and check all 5 simultaneously w/o problem.

Which ISP/Mail Server is giving you the grief???

[ETPhHm]

It is a webhosting service owned by jumpline.com. Don't necessarily think they're great but have been with them for about 10 years now and have been unmotivated to change. This problem has never been serious enough to make the move.

[stan_qaz]

It would be good to get the mail checking options tweaked a bit so that you had the bar we have now for over-all settings but also had an option to limit concurrent connections to the same server to a maximum number. Maybe just a duplicate of the current "Check Throttle" block titled "Single Server Check Throttle" that would limit checks on individual servers but let as many checks as you wanted to be run on different servers.

check1.png (19.2 KiB) Viewed 17273 times

[QuietOne]

Don't know if RD and FT have had any other problems with jumpline.com or not. Might be worth looking into but that's not my call. But again as I've already said, I think it's gotta be something in the area of your ISP/Mail Server causing the problem instead of a problem in MWP.

[QuietOne]

It would be good to get the mail checking options tweaked a bit so that you had the bar we have now for over-all settings but also had an option to limit concurrent connections to the same server to a maximum number. Maybe just a duplicate of the current "Check Throttle" block titled "Single Server Check Throttle" that would limit checks on individual servers but let as many checks as you wanted to be run on different servers.

check1.png

Good idea Stan! Hope they do something like that.

[ETPhHm]

Well FWIW, I tried to search the forums here to look for a similar issue that might have already been addressed (though I didn't spend a lot of time). It seems that not many people (if any other than myself) are having the problem either because most mail servers don't seem to have a limitation on the number of simultaneous connections, or people don't generally have 5 or more email accounts on the same server with all enabled in the default mail check, or maybe people just haven't felt it to be that much of a problem to come here, create a forum account and report it.. and that would be me; I have been experiencing this problem for 5 or 6 years now, but worked around it as previously mentioned. That said, I think the current option they have in MW2010 is very adeqaute and having a slider control or whatever for every server would clutter up the settings interface and make it a little intimidating for some. That's my penny thought.

[stan_qaz]

I don't need it either but there are some heavy mail users that depend on MW and having more control of this might be valuable to them. You usually don't see them posting until they have an issue as they are busy with their primary project that is generating the mail.

[MrBill]

When admins set up servers like this (limited connections from any one mail client or IP) it's generally because they've been burned or learned from somebody who had been burned. At my last job, our internal smarthost was set up to limit connections from any individual IP because we had had runaway MTAs from inside the organization that gobbled up all available connections on the server and brought company internal mail down for hours until we were called in at 2:00 AM to fix it. Since it was an international company with mail in all major time zones, our 2:00 AM was somebody else's prime working hours, and we never wanted that to happen again - hence the limitation.

The situation is definitely a per-server thing, but it may be difficult for MW to tell whether two accounts are on the same server, depending on aliases and such. I wouldn't want an all-or-nothing setting that applies to all mail servers - you could be unnecessarily throttling a server that has a higher (or no) limit.

[rusticdog]

It would be good to get the mail checking options tweaked a bit so that you had the bar we have now for over-all settings but also had an option to limit concurrent connections to the same server to a maximum number. Maybe just a duplicate of the current "Check Throttle" block titled "Single Server Check Throttle" that would limit checks on individual servers but let as many checks as you wanted to be run on different servers.

I think the Check Throttle does a good enough job, at least now you can set MailWasher to do say (in this case) 4 accounts at once. Which is a much better feature than ALL or ONE as we had in the old version.

I don't really see much difference in having MW set to check 4 accounts at once, or limited to 4 accounts per server. We'll see how things go, but my first instinct tells me this Check Throttle we have is all we need.

We previously had a hard coded limit in the core engine for the # of current connections per server, but we later took it out as we felt it complicated things. It's best just to let the UI handle the scheduling.

Well FWIW, I tried to search the forums here to look for a similar issue that might have already been addressed (though I didn't spend a lot of time). It seems that not many people (if any other than myself) are having the problem either because most mail servers don't seem to have a limitation on the number of simultaneous connections, or people don't generally have 5 or more email accounts on the same server with all enabled in the default mail check, or maybe people just haven't felt it to be that much of a problem to come here, create a forum account and report it.. and that would be me; I have been experiencing this problem for 5 or 6 years now, but worked around it as previously mentioned. That said, I think the current option they have in MW2010 is very adeqaute and having a slider control or whatever for every server would clutter up the settings interface and make it a little intimidating for some. That's my penny thought.

This was a really common issue for us around 4-5? years ago. That was back in the day when all the large US ISPs began buying up the smaller ones, I believe it was Earthlink in particular that was buying up big and they had a policy of no more than 5 connections at once. I don't think Earthlink has any connection to Jumpline, but policies like this aren't uncommon.

The real difficulty lies in that we can't properly test this, nor can we tell if that extra connection is due to a policy or an actual error checking the account. I don't believe we can try and be too smart here.
One option could be to flag certain domains we know about, and try to automatically adjust the Check Throttle accordingly, however we will never have an up to date list and would always be chasing our tails.