I was asked by a friend of mine to help his get POP3 working on his server. No problems, I think, takes 5 mins. I was wrong.
I knew it was going to take some thought when I noticed it was running SuSE. I’ve never so much as played with that distro before so it was going to be trial and error.
I finally sorted out the fact that a decent enough imap/pop3 server was already installed, so I changed the xinet configs and tried to connect.
Connection was successful, but entering a user gave a dreaded error that meant is was not going to allow plaintext connections. Some googling later and we deduced this has been deliberately block hard by SuSE so had to go down the SSL route.
The biggest problem was finding out where the ssl certificates go, which I found by checking the logs. Once there imap worked but not pop3. A quick look at the logs and a resulting copy of the imap.pem to pop3d.pem and finally it was working! An hour and a half for that, most of it searching for clues!
All I can say here is it’s a good job I’m now using Linux as my primary system and have previously worked with ssl or I’d still be there now 😉
