Is your server’s POP3 port 995 not working? We’ll help you.

The main reasons for this error are bad firewall settings or missing or incorrect POP3 configuration on the server.

At Bobcares, we often get requests to fix the POP3 errors as part of our Server Management Services.

Today, let’s get into the details and see how our Support Engineers fix this error.

Importance of using port 995 in POP3 mail server

In general, when there are too many emails it shoots up mailbox size. And, it can cause users to struggle with insufficient disk space errors. This is where POP3 helps. It saves server storage space by deleting the emails from the mail server after storing it locally.

POP3 is a standard mail protocol used to retrieve the emails from a remote server to a local email client.

After receiving the email from the mail server, POP3 delete it permanently. Fortunately, this helps to reduce the space that an email account uses on the webserver.

At the same time, it is equally important to use a secure connection for this. Here is where we use port 995, which provides a TLS encrypted connection.

But POP3 protocol is only useful for those, who access their emails from just one location that is, their local machine.

How to configure POP3 with port 995?

Here, let’s see how our Support Engineers configure the incoming mail server in WHM. It uses the Dovecot mail server. To enable POP3 we follow the below steps:

1. Initially, we login to the WHM control panel and go to Service Configuration
2. Then, we select the Mailserver Configuration. Here, we can enable the POP3 protocol and related settings.
3. Finally, we click the Save button.

By default, the ports 110 and 995 are set up on cPanel servers. Dovecot comes with self-signed SSL certificates. Hence to complete the setup, we open the respective service port in the firewall too.

Hence we open the 995 port to enable SSL/TLS encryption for POP3 protocol.

How we fix the POP3 connection error?

Now, let’s see the major reasons for the POP3 connection error and how our Support Engineers fix this.

Missing service

Recently, one of our customers had an error while downloading emails with an email client. He was getting an error,

Can't connect to POP3 server, check POP3 server settings.

Then our Support Engineers found that the mail host he tried to connect to didn’t have POP3 service running.

To verify if the port is listening fine, we use the following command.

telnet mailserver.com 995

Hence, we enabled POP3 on the server and fixed the error.

Bad firewall settings

Another customer had a similar problem and he was unable to download the email to his local system with an Email client.

While checking, our Support Engineers found that the port 995 was not opened in the firewall settings. And this blocked the email client from downloading the email from the server. And he got the error,

Can't connect to POP3 server, check POP3 server settings

Therefore, we tweaked the firewall settings and enabled the port in the firewall settings. In firewalld, we opened the port using the command,

firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=995/tcp
firewall-cmd --reload

That fixed the error.

Likewise, on an Ubuntu server with UFW firewall, we use the command,

ufw allow 995

[Need assistance to fix POP3 errors? We’ll help you.]

Conclusion

In short, POP3 port 995 not working is a common error that can occur due to bad firewall settings or missing POP3 service on the server. Today, we also saw how our Support Engineers configured POP3 mail server.