Not for me, for the Wife. She has a POP email account that she’s maintained and used for years now. Being the local computer expert, I’ve setup our system so as to streamline her email experience. Basically, that means downloading her emails to a home based server and then making them available to her. The nice thing about the setup is that she can easily access her email from her laptop or desktop without worries about synchronizing.
The other benefits for her is that I get to deal with the headaches that inevitably arise. A curious one has been happening for the past couple of days.
I’ve setup my server to download from the email account using SSL. Yesterday, I started getting warnings that the downloads were unsuccessful because the name of the server on the certificate that was being sent did not match the name of the server that I’m connecting to. Curious, as the system had been working for years now without a glitch.
So I updated the certificate authority database on my server and that seemed to resolve the issue. No more warnings, until this morning.
So I got on a chat line with a Yahoo tech guy who, unfortunately, was not entirely helpful. I tried to explain to him about the names not matching between the certificate being sent by their server and the server name that I’m using to connect to. He didn’t seem to grasp that and instead had me checking port settings and the like. After I humored him by connecting and downloading without using SSL (in other words, everything was sent in the clear) he told me to contact my ISP about them blocking the SSL port.
This was rubbish- the server has no problems using SSL to download from a variety of POP servers so there’s no way the port is blocked. So after disconnecting from the chat, I went back and setup everything again to download using SSL. It worked again.
Curious.
Frankly, I was beginning to smell something fishy, so I went and changed her login password for the POP account. I updated the password here and tried again and everything still seems to be OK. So at this point, all I’ve got are suspicions as to what might be going on. Something to keep an eye on.