A user reported that she was unable to check her email today; she had also
reported the problem yesterday. When I checked
Sendmail,
which would handle her outgoing email, by using
Telnet to
connect to the well-known port for
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) on the server with
telnet mail.example.com 25, I saw the Sendmail banner as expected,
so I presumed her problem was likely with
Dovecot, the software on the system that would allow her to receive her
incoming email. I tried connecting to port 110, the well-known port
for Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) connections using
Telnet. When I saw the "Connected to" and "Escape character is" messages, I
entered the POP3 user command followed by the user's name,
but I would shortly thereafter see a "Connection closed" message every
time I tried the connection with Telnet. I never saw the "Dovecot ready" prompt
appear.
# telnet 127.0.0.1 110 Trying 127.0.0.1... Connected to 127.0.0.1. Escape character is '^]'. user nell Connection closed by foreign host. You have new mail in /var/spool/mail/root #
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