Hi All,

When I telnet to my box from outside my lan on port 110 I DONT get a connection refused. I also DONT get a pop3 banner of any type

Should I? What would prohibit this? Port forwarding from the firewall is working as is evidence by the connection not being refused. I can send and receive mail just fine, just cant pop it.

Thanks

-=mwm

Are port 110 being forwarded?
Using lsof -i :110 you can list all running processes that use this port.

lsof -i :100 produces:
xinetd 16465 root 5u IPv4 65914 TCP *op3 (LISTEN)

Yes, 110 is being forwarded to my mail server. If this was not the case I would expect to get a connection refused right?

Thanks for tip on the command....

-=mwm

Is there a way to watch the server for this connection so I can verify it sees the telnet request?

Try the command I sugested earlier on the server.
That would tell you if the server is listening in on the right port.
Use ethereal on the server to monitor if the packets get through to the RJ45 jack on your NIC.
Check with man page for the pop3 server to see if there are any debug mode where you can run that service as a forground process to see what's happening.

Within your LAN, you can telnet into your box's local IP port 110 and get your POP3 server to answer, correct? But when you try outside your LAN you don't get a POP3 banner? Are you telnetting into the same IP address when you do it from the outside, or do you have an inside and outside address? (i.e. 192.168.x.x/10.x.x.x and a real world IP address for the outside)

If you have two different addresses, do you have a router as a gateway to the Internet? If so, what kind is it, and do you have port 110 mapped over correctly?

You can interpret a lot of issues by looking at your /var/log/messages or /var/log/maillog (depending on your syslog configuration). POP3 sessions should be recorded properly in one of those files. If any connection attempt should be recorded.. even if you just telnet in and disconnect, you should get something like this:

Oct 30 10:41:54 l3det-phantom popa3d[4115]: Session from 127.0.0.1
Oct 30 10:41:55 l3det-phantom popa3d[4115]: Didn't attempt authentication