Licence activation not working

When VPOP3 is started it will validate the licence key online to make sure that your licence allows you to run the installed version of VPOP3 (this is to avoid us needing to issue new licence keys every few months (and you needing to keep track of them)).

In the majority of cases this will work automatically without any intervention from you. However, in some cases, people may have tightened security on their Internet connections so much that VPOP3 cannot connect to the licence activation servers, so this article tells you the information you may need to alter your network security configuration.

Note that VPOP3 will try for several hours before giving up, so even if VPOP3 cannot contact the activation servers, it will work for several hours before stopping. You can check the current state of the activation process on the 'About' page in the VPOP3 settings.

VPOP3 tries to contact one of the following servers using HTTPS (on TCP port 443). VPOP3 chooses the actual server to connect to on each attempt randomly so that if one server is not working temporarily it should be able to connect to another one.

  • activate0.pscs.co.uk
  • activate1.pscs.co.uk
  • activate2.pscs.co.uk
  • activate3.pscs.co.uk
  • activate4.pscs.co.uk
  • activate5.pscs.co.uk
  • activate6.pscs.co.uk
  • activate7.pscs.co.uk

You can check for a hardware firewall blocking connections by going to https://activate0.pscs.co.uk in a web browser on the VPOP3 PC. This will show a short message to show you can connect if your hardware router/firewall is allowing the connection.

A software firewall/Internet security software can just prevent VPOP3.EXE from accessing other servers even if your web browser can, so if the web browser can connect, but VPOP3 can't, you need to check there. Note that occasionally a hardware firewall will allow a web browser to work, but not VPOP3 or the VPOP3 installer. We are uncertain why that is (possibly a hardware firewall is blocking certain SSL ciphers).

Also, some proxy servers require client software to be installed on the PC. In these cases, that client software may not work if VPOP3 is running as a service, so it can be worth trying to stop the VPOP3 service and just run it as an application (by launching the 'VPOP3.EXE' program directly) and see if that can connect. If so, you may need to talk to the technical support for the proxy server software to see if there is any way of allowing a Windows service to connect through the proxy server.

If you still have problems after disabling software firewalls or reconfiguring a hardware firewall not to block connections, then contact us and we will see if there is another way you can manually activate the software rather than using the automated system.