On Thu, 2002-01-17 at 18:10, Robert Finneran wrote: > The timeout problem started happening at my company after a user downloaded > a new update to the McAffee virus scanner. > > My theory is the virus update contained some kind of shared COM component > that outlook uses to retrieve pop3.
Some virus scanners install a proxy POP3 server on the local workstation. The email client is then set to consult this proxy, and the proxy makes the connection to the real server. The Symantec scanner does this. The anti-virus POP3 proxies have known problems with SSL servers. Check the email settings in Outlook and see if the POP3 server was changed to localhost or 127.0.0.1. If so, that's what happened. You'll need to consult with the AV vendor to see if they have a fix. If not, you can switch your clients back to direct connect to your real server. Meanwhile, you can also install a server-side AV scanner. There's a free one called the "Procmail Sanitizer" that runs as a procmail recipe via sendmail and "defangs" dangerous attachments by adding an extra bogus extension. This keeps clueless users from just double-clicking on executable material.
