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Outlook could not connect to the server

Recently I encountered a problem with setting up emails at a large corporation with email hosted through mediatemple. The computers initially were able to connect, send and receive messages without a problem. But after a day or two we noticed some problems with the email. When the computers would try and connect, about 50% of the time they would error out with a message saying the server disconnected and you could not send or receive emails. This would last for about 5 minutes and then go away as if nothing happened.

There were a couple things I found out while troubleshooting this problem which helped to lead to the eventual solution.

• no matter how much I tried, I could not duplicate the error on a machine at a different physical location.
• there were no anti virus programs interrupting the connection.
• when one machine would get the error, all the machines would get it.
• I could get email from a different domain through mediatemple at the same time it received the error for the first.
• There was no problem with the internet connection while the symptoms occurred.

Once I saw that all machines received the error at the same time I thought that their might be something limiting the amount of connections to the server. I called mediatemple to see if their was anything that might limit the connections to the email and sure enough there was. They gave me a link to a knowledge base article about how to increase the maxperip setting for the imap. The only problem is we werent using imap, it was pop3. They said that it didnt matter that it was for imap, it was used to control both… but it did matter and it did not fix the problem.

After some more searching around I found that there was a way to set the maximum connections per ip for pop3 email. The file was in the same folder and named pop3d. Essentially it was the same change mediatemple recommended but specific to pop3 email.

Once the change was made, and I restarted the mail services, the error went away and has only shown its head once in the last month and it immediately went away. If you are experiencing the same issue than the article in the knowledge base for resetting the imap courier connections is a great article and you can follow it almost word for word. All you need to do is make the same changes in the pop3d file instead of the imap file specified.

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