Fixed POP3 Service after Exchange 2013 CU6

Post author By jermsmit
Post date October 2, 2014
11 Comments on Fixed POP3 Service after Exchange 2013 CU6

In a previous post I wrote about my Exchange 2013 CU6 Adventure and how it caused my Exchange Replication Services to crash.

That wasn’t the only issues faced after updating to CU6. It seems that the CU6 upgrade had crippled my ability to use the POP3 service.

I have been waiting for a week now for Microsoft to get back to me regarding a solution. But I was able to find one else ware thanks to Jason (Izzy) Sherry’s Blog Post: Exchange 2013 POP3 service drops connections fix

Symptoms:

Exchange 2013 POP3 request fail from remote hosts
Exchange 2013 POP3 request respond from localhost

Troubleshooting Steps:

Restart POP3 and POP3 Back-end Services
Reconfigure Exchange POP3 Local IP Address
Check server for firewall
Check if 3rd party antivirus may be intercepting POP3 requests
Inspect traffic using Wireshark

Solution Steps Followed:

In Exchange Powershell type:
Get-ServerComponentstate -Identity SERVERNAME

This will list the Server Component States

Server	Component	State
SERVERNAME	ServerWideOffline	Active
SERVERNAME	HubTransport	Active
SERVERNAME	FrontendTransport	Active
SERVERNAME	Monitoring	Active
SERVERNAME	RecoveryActionsEnabled	Active
SERVERNAME	AutoDiscoverProxy	Active
SERVERNAME	ActiveSyncProxy	Active
SERVERNAME	EcpProxy	Active
SERVERNAME	EwsProxy	Active
SERVERNAME	ImapProxy	Active
SERVERNAME	OabProxy	Active
SERVERNAME	OwaProxy	Active
SERVERNAME	PopProxy	Inactive
SERVERNAME	PushNotificationsProxy	Active
SERVERNAME	RpsProxy	Active
SERVERNAME	RwsProxy	Active
SERVERNAME	RpcProxy	Active
SERVERNAME	UMCallRouter	Active
SERVERNAME	XropProxy	Active
SERVERNAME	HttpProxyAvailabilityGroup	Active
SERVERNAME	ForwardSyncDaemon	Active
SERVERNAME	ProvisioningRps	Active
SERVERNAME	MapiProxy	Active
SERVERNAME	EdgeTransport	Active
SERVERNAME	HighAvailability	Active
SERVERNAME	SharedCache	Active

Now that you have identified the issue; as you can see POPProxy is set to Inactive we need to now set it back to Active

So we issue the following command:

Set-ServerComponentState -Identity SERVERNAME -Component PopProxy -Requester HealthAPI -State Active

As soon as you do this the POP3 Service start to respond again.

Problem now fixed, cause is still unknown. The only thing known in my case is that this occurred after installing Exchange 2013 CU6

Tags CU6, Exchange, Exchange 2013, Fix, Microsoft, POP3, ServerComponentState, technical

11 replies on “Fixed POP3 Service after Exchange 2013 CU6”

I hit this issue in CU5, so not specific to CU6

Come to think of it. We updated CU5 about 8 days before being told to update to CU6.
Its possible that the issue started in CU5 and we did not notice until after the CU6 update when facing a slew of other problems.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention

Awesome, thanks! 🙂

After having updated to CU6 (from RTM), noticed POP didn’t work anymore (and we updated 2 weeks ago) – so had a hard time finding out what caused the issue.

Cheers!

This solves after PopProxy component goes Active again, and service pop3 restarts.
But i’m still trying to find why this happens… 🙁
It is very weird, because I have very few clients using pop3 (10 max).
I’m on CU7, but happen before with CU5 and CU6.
Anyone ?!

This works for us, but it doesn’t save, if we reboot it reverts back, and at times it just reverts on its own. Anyone else come across this?

That’s interesting I did not find this to be the case. The rollup update which broke the issue was completely repeatable in a test environment and the solution also.