Software Installation  |  User Q&A  |  Troubleshooting

There was one user with this problem once. He did not have the right permissions to delete files in the email folders. You can easily check if that's also your problem by changing the way Internet Explorer reports errors. After your changes IE will report exactly what file and what line is not working as it should. Go to Tools / Internet Options / Advanced and then change these settings:

• "Disable script debugging": UNCHECKED
  (meaning enable script debugging; sorry for the double negative)
• "Display a notification about every script error": CHECKED
• "Show friendly HTTP error messages": UNCHECKED
  ('friendly' is bad, in this case.)

First you should test the settings you are using in the login form of WebmailASP. To make sure you are not making some basic mistake enter the same settings in a desktop client such as Outlook. Keep in mind, however, that, depending on the POP settings, you may be able read email on Outlook or Eudora, but not with WebmailASP. This may happen because your desktop client is running on your local machine and WebmailASP is running on the web server (in the case of the demo: our machine). Maybe your machine is authorized to talk with the POP server, and the Web server is blocked.

If the POP server is inside a firewall, make sure that the ports are open for POP and SMTP communication. If the server is configurable in terms of what client machines to allow and what client machines to block, try to disable blocking.

In the end, if that POP server has severe communication restrictions, it may be possible that the only way to get WebmailASP to talk with it is by installing WebmailASP on the same machine or the same local area network (LAN).

3 - I am not able to receive messages. What may be the problem?

First you need to verify that the POP email component is correctly installed (run the wizard diagnostics.asp.) If the email component is correctly installed, the next basic check is on the email box itself. For the exact same account, go to Outlook and try to retrieve the messages. Make sure that you have Outlook set to "copy", because you want the messages to stay in the server for further testing.

If the POP server can be reached using Outlook, it may still be possible that the current machine where you are running Outlook has permissions for communicating with the POP server, but the web server machine doesn't. See previous question on this issue but keep in mind that, in terms of login and separately from the actual Inbox-refresh action, WebmailASP contacts the POP server when the user signs on for the first time, but not when the user logins afterwards.

Another time when WebmailASP contacts the POP server without actually trying to retrieve messages is when the user makes changes to the POP fields in the Account Settings dialog. In order to help diagnose your problem, change the "POP server" field in a way that should still work. For example: change mail.xyz.com to mail.xyz.COM. When you press submit, WebmailASP will try to contact the POP server with the new settings. If the window closes without reporting any error, it means that WebmailASP was able to contact the POP server without problem.

If WebmailASP is able to contact the POP server, but still fails to get the mail messages, open the Refresh Inbox dialog and press Refresh. If error messages are displayed in the dialog, proceed according to the messages. If the dialog reports that there are messages in the POP server but none of them is new and you think otherwise, there may be a message id conflict. Some POP servers accept malformed messages (usually spam). These messages have repeated ids. WebmailASP downloads the first one, but not subsequent ones. In this case the best solution is to make sure that in the Account Settings dialog the option "On each refresh, automatically delete from the POP account the following messages:" is set to "All".

4 - When I use the demo, I can read incoming mail fine but I cannot send email through the SMTP server. Am I doing something wrong?

Please look in the report shown by the Compose dialog after the failure. If you are seeing one of the error codes below, email authentication is failing:

• 550 relaying mail is not allowed
• 503 No recipients specified (550 happened first, but was not displayed.)
• 553 sorry, that domain isn't in my list of allowed rcpthosts

Suppose user a@a.com wants to send an email to user b@b.com. An authentication problem happens when a.com's outgoing email server refuses to send mail to the b.com machine. The SMTP servers implement these restrictions to keep unauthorized users (usually spammers) away, but sometimes the side-effect is to exclude perfectly valid usage scenarios.

The solution for the problem you are seeing in WebmailASP depends on the type of authentication used. There are three types: one based on the location (the IP) of the machine sending the message (in WebmailASP's case, the machine is the Web server machine), the other based on requiring username and password parameters, and the third based on the location of the machine intended to receive the message.

Solutions:

• If you can change the configuration of the SMTP server or ask for it to be changed, any of the three types of authentication can be made to work with WebmailASP.
• If your email account is in the email server of an ISP, and your ISP only authorizes one machine (for example the home machine) you will see this problem using the demo but will not see it if you install WebmailASP on the authorized machine.
• If the SMTP server requires the email client to send username and password (similar to POP server), install WebmailASP on a machine with the w3 JMail Professional email component. JMail supports this type of authentication, but ASPMail/POP3 doesn't.

5 - JMail is not able to handle these two factors together: an SMTP server that requires authentication and a POP username that has a domain suffix ("a@b.c", instead of simply "a"). JMail reserves the symbol "@" as a separator in the Send command. How can I make JMail work with my SMTP server?

At least until version 4.4 of w3 JMail, Dimac.net has not been able to correct this problem. The only solution JMail users (with WebmailASP or without) have is to remove the authentication requirement from the SMTP server. This can be done easily and without compromising security. The idea is to tell the SMTP server that the web server machine (where JMail is running), and only that machine, does not require authentication.

If you administer your own SMTP server, you can do this yourself. If you are using the SMTP server and the web server of a hosting company, it will be simply a matter of making the hosting company understand that if they provide JMail and they provide SMTP, then they must be able to make them work together. Different hosting companies have different strategies. Some will give you access to a special SMTP server, some will simply remove authentication from your regularly assigned SMTP server.

6 - When I use the "automatically delete from POP=None" setting, WebmailASP initially reads all messages from my mail box correctly, but then has trouble picking up new messages.

This can happen with some types of POP server and specially if your account receives large quantities of spam. The problem is that new messages are not given correct ID's by the server, and WebmailASP cannot distinguish them from messages already downloaded.

The best solution is to change to "automatically delete from POP=all" in Account / Settings dialog.

7 - Sometimes, when automatically refreshing the Inbox, I get the error "The Microsoft Jet database engine stopped the process because you and another user are attempting to change the same data at the same time". Why does this happen?

This can happen if you have one WebmailASP window open on one computer (for example at work) and another WebmailASP window open in another computer (for example at home) and your setting of refreshing Inbox is automatic. It is unlikely, but it can happen, that both places try to access the data of the same user (yours) at the same time. This scenario is only a problem with MS Access, not with MS SQL Server.