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Customers complain often that s/he cannot receive e-mail through their mail client. There could be many reasons as to why they are not receiving their e-mail. Before a reason is established by the system administrator, it is necessary to determine if the problem is occuring from the user’s side, or the server’s side. How do we find out where the problem originates? – Very simple. We need to see for ourselves, if we are able to check our customer’s email.

How can that be done? – Two ways:

1. Configure our customer’s email account on our mail client, and try to receive his email.
2. Check our customer’s POP3 account through Telnet.

Configuring our customer’s e-mail through our own mail client can take some time, and if we forget to check the box that says to ‘Leave mail on server,’ then we basically download and wipe our customer’s email from his POP3 account. The quickest and safest way would be to check it from the CLI (command line), using Telnet on our side.

Step 1: Telnet to the mail server through port 110 (POP3 port)
Step 2: Listing and viewing your customer’s current email

Now that we have connected to the mail server, we need to authenticate ourselves with our customer’s username and password. Type in your customer’s username, followed by his password:

+OK Welcome to MailEnable POP3 Server
user user@e-hosting.com.my
pass 1234567890

Our next step would be to get a listing of our customer’s mailbox (be sure to send a test email prior to checking the mailbox, just in case the mailbox is empty). Type ‘list’ at the CLI to list all the current mail, following by ‘retr’ (where is the message number) to retrieve a specific email.

That’s all! – If the above steps worked, then it means that there is nothing wrong with the customer’s email account on the server’s side. If your customer continues,

Here is a summary of the POP commands that can be used in the CLI:

1. USER user@e-hosting.com.my - Log in as “pete.freeserve.co.uk”
2. PASS password - Substituting “password” for your actual password
3. STAT - List number of messages, total mailbox size
4. LIST - List messages and sizes
5. RETR n - Show message n (where n is number of the message required)
6. DELE n - Mark message n for deletion (where n is number of the message required)
7. RSET - Undo any changes
8. QUIT - Logout (expunges messages if no RSET)