xinetd had to be closed...

[jez9999]

I wasn't receiving any e-mail via POP, even though I could see that my mailbox contained about 130 mails, via webmail. I tried to run /scripts/restartsrv_cppop, but I kept getting a message that it was waiting to bind to port 110, which was already in use. After a bit of netstat'ing, I discovered that xinetd (xinetd -stayalive -pidfile /var/run/xinetd.pid) was setup to LISTEN on there constantly, so I did a kill -9 on it and ran /scripts/restartsrv_cppop again, this time cppop starting fine.

Now I can download my e-mail ok, but I was wondering whether xinetd needed to be running for any reason; it was listening on the pop3, pop3s and imap ports. If it doesn't need to be running and indeed prevents cppop from running, how did it manage to start running on my server?

[chirpy]

You've clearly got an additional pop3 daemon running in xinetd. Have a look in /etc/xinetd.d/* usually the only file in there that should have "disable = no" is cpimap (though some OS's might also have ssh running through TCP Wrappers, so take care with that). So, any pop related entries should be set to "disable = yes" and then restart xinetd.

[jez9999]

Aha, yes; it seems both /usr/sbin/stunnel and /usr/sbin/popa3d were running when they shouldn't have been. I've seen previous problems about popa3d on the forums but stunnel? Does that usually come along with it?

[chirpy]

I've not seen stunnel running from within xinetd before. The main thing for your issue would be to do the pop daemons. Might be best to leave the others.