Ubuntu
evolution package

Need to ping server before send or receiving using POP3

Asked by rjhutt

Evolution will not connect successfully to btinternet to send or receive email unless I first ping the btinternet server mail.btinternet.com. The email account is correctly setup for POP and SMTP with authentication enabled.
Once mail.btinternet.com is pinged Evolution will connect to the server successfully. If two or three send/receives are done within a short period email can be sent and received but if no send or receive is initiated for 5 minutes Evolution will not connect again until mail.btinternet.com has been pinged again.

Question information

Language:
English Edit question
Status:
Answered
For:
Ubuntu evolution Edit question
Assignee:
No assignee Edit question
Last query:
Last reply:
Revision history for this message
Carthik Sharma (carthik) said : 		#1

This might be a feature of the mail server that you use. The mail server might be using POP before SMTP, or SMTP-AUTH, both if which require users to either use POP (to fetch mail) or to authenticate themselves periodically.

I can see at the help page for your service:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/uk/bt/login/#link_5

That indeed, SMTP authentication is required (look at the last screenshot).

Hope this answers why its working the way it is.

Revision history for this message
rjhutt (rjh-esto) said : 		#2

This doesn't explain why Evolution does not receive or send email unless the server is pinged first. It is never a problem when sending or receiving email using any other email application under windows, e.g Outlook, Outlook Express, Pegasus or Thunderbird.
As stated in the original report SMTP-AUTH had been selected and the correct username and password entered.

Revision history for this message
Scott Zawalski (cowbud) said : 		#3

When you use thunderbird in Linux does the same issue occur?

What happens if you change the hostname to the ip address do you still have the issue?

Revision history for this message
rjhutt (rjh-esto) said : 		#4

I installed Thunderbird in ubuntu and got the same problem.

If I use the ip address of mail.btinternet.com (217.146.188.192) I still have the same problem.
As it is also possible to use the yahoo.co.uk pop servers to pickup btinternet mail I tried using them instead.
I see the same issue if I use pop.mail.yahoo.co.uk & smtp.mail.yahoo.co.uk but if I use the ip addresses of pop.mail.yahoo.co.uk (217.12.10.100) and smtp.mail.yahoo.co.uk (217.12.11.66) it seems to work ok most of the time.

Revision history for this message
Scott Zawalski (cowbud) said : 		#5

So it is obviously some sort of network setup when you are in Linux.

Try the following:

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/bad_list

Add
 alias net-pf-10 off

Then save and exit out of nano (ctrl-x)

Reboot your system and see if that fixes the issue. What we are doing is disabling IPv6 here which is known to cause strange issues.

Revision history for this message
rjhutt (rjh-esto) said : 		#6

I had already though that might be an issue as I had to disable IPv6 to get Firefox to work and had setup bad_list to disable IPv6 as well as disabling it in /etc/modprobe.d/aliases

Revision history for this message
Markus Thielmann (thielmann) said : 		#7

As checking the authentication methods works fine here, you might want to try disabling IPv6 as you did for firefox:

Open /etc/modprobe.d/bad_list
and add

alias net-pf-10 off

Reboot and see if the problem is solved.

Can you help with this problem?

Provide an answer of your own, or ask rjhutt for more information if necessary.

To post a message you must log in.