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POP3 Connection Error


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After an update to WHMCS 7.6 we have noticed that we are receiving an awful lot of "POP3 Connection Error" emails. This issue did not appear before an upgrade. The email piping works properly and in changelog I have noticed that new hook was added "PopEmailCollectionCronCompleted" (Unfortunately it's function is not described at all) which leads me to a conclusion that now every time the cron runs and system is trying to pull the emails into the system and is making the connection and can not connect for one reason or another it sends email message stating that. At least that is how it seems to work as I do not see any other email related change in the changelog.

So my question is, could anyone clarify that for my (maybe I am wrong and something else causes this, although as I have said the issue did not exist pre update), and if that is the case how can I get rid of this. Maybe not completely, but over a period of one day I can get a dozens of those since we have multiple email addresses attached in our system. It gets really annoying and I do not see a reason to filter messages just to hide that unnecessary SPAM if I can just remove it completely.

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We upgraded to WHMCS 7.6.0 yesterday and have received about eight of these "POP3 connection error" emails since then. This didn't happen before the upgrade.

Our email import cron job is working well most of the time, and if just one or two import runs fail then that's not too big a deal. If WHMCS thinks it needs to notify us when there's a problem fetching emails, perhaps it could be configured so that it will only do so if the last X imports have failed?

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5 hours ago, Tom Catchesides said:

If WHMCS thinks it needs to notify us when there's a problem fetching emails, perhaps it could be configured so that it will only do so if the last X imports have failed?

I must admit that I have (as of yet) not had one of these notifications but I agree fully with this idea but also this would then allow us to at least know that its going to happen as I can't find anything anywhere about this 'feature improvement'

 

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  • WHMCS Support Manager

Hi there,

This is a minor new feature in 7.6.

Whenever an error is encountered by pop.php, an email is now sent to full administrators detailing the error. In this way you are pre-actively notified when a problem is occurring with email importing, rather than finding out from angry customers whose emails haven't been answered!

You can reproduce the error by enabling the Setup > General Settings > Other tab > Display Errors option, and then visiting the /crons/pop.php file directly in your browser.

We have some troubleshooting resources for email piping here:

If you're encountering other errors and would find a troubleshooting article helpful in future, please let me know here.

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Thanks, John!

I might have misunderstood your reply but I turned off the 'Display Errors' option in Setup > General Settings > Other tab, but I'm still receiving "POP3 Connection Error" emails from WHMCS 7.6.0.

To be clear, our POP3 email import works well the vast majority of the time, but these notification emails reveal that it intermittently fails. I agree that being notified if support email import has catastrophically failed is a very good thing, but if it fails 1% of the time then that's really not a big deal for us.

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On 8/9/2018 at 8:15 AM, WHMCS John said:

Hi there,

This is a minor new feature in 7.6.

Whenever an error is encountered by pop.php, an email is now sent to full administrators detailing the error

For us, we get an error report every 5 minutes since we upgrade to 7.6. All it's reporting is that there is no new mail to import... that the mailbox is empty.  It seems that email pipe is still working fine if there is a new message, but we get a warning message every 5 minutes telling me there's no new messages.

One or more POP3 connections failed:
-----
Hosting Sales <*****@************.com>
Error: Connection error: Mailbox is empty
-----

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • WHMCS Support Manager

Hi @9DollarDomains,

I would not expect a "Mailbox is empty" response to trigger a connection error. This would indicate that message is being thrown as an exception in pop.php, but such a message usually indicates everything is normal.

Could you please open a support ticket with access credentials so that we can investigate this on your server? Feel free to PM the ticket ID to me personally.

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  • 2 months later...

Hi John, thanks for the help.  I ended up solving it (somehow) on this end.  I actually loath when people say "solved it" without details on how they did it - that's not a lot of help for the next guy.  But, that's what happened - it's solved and I don't know how. :)   Anyway, thanks for the offer to help.

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 11/4/2018 at 11:26 PM, 9DollarDomains said:

Hi John, thanks for the help.  I ended up solving it (somehow) on this end.  I actually loath when people say "solved it" without details on how they did it - that's not a lot of help for the next guy.  But, that's what happened - it's solved and I don't know how. 🙂  Anyway, thanks for the offer to help.

Perhaps you didn't null the output? 

php -q /home/mysite/whmcs_crons/pop.php >/dev/null 2>&1

With the ">/dev/null 2>&1" added you will not get the "Mailbox is empty" messages every 5 minutes.  You will still get errors like the POP3 connection error.

I am here because we also started getting the POP3 connection error messages after we upgraded to 7.6.  We use gmail and it's not like we can do anything about it on that end.  I sure hope someone finds a solution because these messages are going to be annoying.

 

Edited by mustardman
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  • 3 months later...
  • WHMCS Support Manager

Hi there,

If you are still experiencing this issue, can you please provide some information about your email server to help troubleshoot:

  • Server OS and Kernel version:
  • Mailserver and version (eg. Dovecot)
  • Control Panel and version (if applicable eg. cPanel, Plesk etc)
  • POP Port (as entered into WHMCS Setup > Support > support Departments > Edit)

 

 

 

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Are any of you using SSL ports for checking pop3?  If so, check that the certificate behind that is valid and can be validated by your web server.  In this case, you need to set PHP"s openssl ca path and curl capath to the server's trusted certificates file.  At least this the case for curl / http requests from whmcs.  The change may be from moving from php 5.6 to 7.0 where SSL verification is enabled by default for at least curl. 

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  • 1 month later...

Hi Sorry to keep this going but i have this issue too.

tickets can be raised no issue with the email and replyied to. nothing comes up in the error log even though errors are acivated to be logged.

I get these emails contantly (around 20-40 daily)

WHMCS 7.7.1, centOs 7.6, dovecot/exim via cpanel, POP Port 995.

All software mentioned above is running on the latest version available.

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  • WHMCS Technical Analyst II
On 4/29/2019 at 6:03 AM, Mark Coates said:

Hi Sorry to keep this going but i have this issue too.

tickets can be raised no issue with the email and replyied to. nothing comes up in the error log even though errors are acivated to be logged.

I get these emails contantly (around 20-40 daily)

WHMCS 7.7.1, centOs 7.6, dovecot/exim via cpanel, POP Port 995.

All software mentioned above is running on the latest version available.

There is a case open at cPanel (CPANEL-26439 I believe) that deals with a particular "POP3 connection broken in response" error that sounds like it may apply here, and should correct this once they've resolved it in the Dovecot software that they use for e-mail. I'd recommend reaching out to them to see if they have a workaround or update regarding it and see if that helps.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I am also getting this problem for a few months. I got a reply from whmcs support that this is a known issue but no word about a fix.

 

i actually created a filter that automatically archives the message but I need to keep my mail client open all the time.

POP import works fine. Just these annoying messages that keep popping randomly from time to time. 

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12 hours ago, Mark Coates said:

Do you guys get this randomly like me or is it just me as some days like today I’ve had about 4 but then other days can be like 50?

It seems to be random for our installation. Some days we get no notifications, others it’s more like 20 over the course of a day.

I had wondered whether it could have anything to do with other uses for the relevant email account (e.g maximum number of logins over a certain period) but we sometimes get notifications overnight when that’s much less likely.

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On 5/6/2019 at 5:15 PM, Pieter Rubeus said:

Any feedback on this yet. The emails are getting an issue now. It start to send it for every support department I have and is seriously irritating now.

I will appreciate feedback from WHMCS for a resolve from cPanel ?

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hello :)

We are receiving the same strange emails with different support departments. We are not using cpanel, but another panel, so the problem is not coming from the panel.

I am confirming that the emails are getting imported successfully and no errors (apart from this) are coming up.

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