VPOP3 Status Monitor Problems

The VPOP3 Status Monitor is the program which shows the little (usually red) postbox icon in the Windows task tray. This usually launches automatically from the Windows startup group. This program is VPOP3Status.EXE on the disk, or can be run manually from Start → Programs → VPOP3 → VPOP3 Monitor in Windows.

The status monitor talks to VPOP3 using TCP/IP, usually using port 5109, and it has to log into VPOP3 as a user, so different users can be configured to access different features through the status monitor. Therefore, you should be able to the status monitor from any computer on your network.

If you have multiple status monitor icons in the task tray, this does not mean that VPOP3 is running several times, just that the VPOP3 Status Monitor has been started several times. Sometimes this can happen if it has been added to the 'All Users' Startup group as well as your personal Startup group in Windows.

How you remove the duplicate icon depends on the version of Windows you are using.

In Windows 7, press the Start button, go to All Programs, then find the Startup group. Right-click it and choose 'Explore All Users'. This will show the list of startup items in the 'All Users' group, rather than your personal group. Remove the VPOP3 Monitor shortcut from there.

• If you just have Help and Disconnect from VPOP3 Server in the menu, then that usually means that the incorrect address and/or port has been set in the status monitor configuration. Sometimes people change the port to 5108 for some reason, instead of leaving it at the default port 5109. To check this, choose Disconnect from VPOP3 Server then choose Configure Status Monitor. In the settings window that appears, make sure that the VPOP3 Server Address is correctly set to the IP address or DNS name of the VPOP3 computer, and the port is set to 5109 (unless you have changed the status server bind port in VPOP3 itself).

• If you have Webmail, but not VPOP3 Settings then that usually means that you have configured to status monitor to log in as a user who is not a VPOP3 administrator. To correct this, choose Disconnect from VPOP3 Server, then Configure Status Monitor, and check the username and password are for a valid VPOP3 administrator account.

If the status monitor is not showing all the data you'd expect, then it is probable that the status monitor is logging in as a user without permissions to see that data. To correct this, choose Disconnect from VPOP3 Server then Configure Status Monitor and check which user it is logging in as. Then edit that user in the VPOP3 settings, go that user's Permissions tab and check that the Remote Status Server Permissions section contains the desired options.

If the VPOP3 status monitor is unable to connect to VPOP3:

• Check any firewall/Internet security software isn't blocking it, or blocking access to the VPOP3 server
• Right-click the status monitor icon and choose 'Configure Status Monitor'. Check the server address is correct, check the port is correct (usually 5109 - not 5108) and check the username/password are set to a valid VPOP3 username/password.
• Check VPOP3 is running - try Start → Program Files → VPOP3 → Configure VPOP3 to see if that can access the VPOP3 settings. Even if the VPOP3.EXE process is running in Task Manager (or the VPOP3 service is started), VPOP3 may not have started up yet - see trouble-shooting tips for that.
• Check the VPOP3 Status Service is running. In some versions of VPOP3 this can get disabled if certain problems were encounteed during startup. Go here for details on fixing this.

You may find that the VPOP3 status monitor is double-correcting for the time zone difference. For instance, if your local time zone is UTC+2, then you may find that the status monitor is displaying times as UTC+4. Alternatively, you may find that the status monitor is not correcting for the time zone difference at all, and is only showing times in UTC.

This happens because you have the incorrect version of the VPOP3 status monitor on your PC. You should use the status monitor software from the VPOP3 installation (usually stored in the main VPOP3 installation directory as VPOP3STATUS.EXE).

The VPOP3 installer will update the status monitor version on the VPOP3 PC itself, but it will not automatically update it if it has been copied to any other PCs.

In older versions of VPOP3, VPOP3 itself would correct for the time zone to send times to the status monitor in VPOP3's local time, which the status monitor would simply display as-is - this caused issues for multinational installations where the status monitor was not in the same time zone as VPOP3 itself. Therefore, in the current versions of VPOP3, VPOP3 sends the times in UTC, and the status monitor corrects the time into its local time.

So, if you have a current VPOP3, and an old status monitor, then VPOP3 will send the time in UTC, and the status monitor will not correct it. Alternatively, if you have an old VPOP3, and a current status monitor, then VPOP3 will correct to the local time zone, and the status monitor will also “correct” to the local time zone, meaning that a double correction occurs.