Re: ghostly mail ports

From: Brian Bruns <bruns(at)2mbit.com>
Date: Sat Jan 11 2003 - 01:17:14 EST

At 04:20 PM 1/10/03 -0000, joe wrote:
>Yeah, I knew what the ports are for, its just that they don't seem to be

Basically, for a port to be 'open', a program or service has to open the port. When the program/service quits/dies, the port is closed also. If the process is frozen/locked, it may still answer the port, but just not return data or accept data.

>I have (by process of elimination) worked out its Norton AV 2003, and im not

I have to look this up, but, in order to support non-outlook/outlook-express clients (I think it can be manually told to use the old style setup proxy too), NAV will start up a pop proxy and smtp proxy service, which actually opens the ports. In your mail client, the IP address of your mail server setting is 127.0.0.1, which tells it to use the localhost pop proxy/smtp proxy. When making an outgoing connection to the mail server, your mail client talks to the proxy, which then talks on your client's behalf to the mail server. Basically, your mail client never actually speaks directly to the mail server. This is how it intercepts viruses.

In the username box, instead of just your username, you have to put in username@mail.server.com, because the POP3/SMTP server is set to localhost.

So, as long as the POP3/SMTP proxy programs are running via NAV, the ports are open. In 2002, its easy to disable the email checking - its via the options under e-mail scanning.

Bri

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Brian Bruns
Founder, The Summit Open Source Development Group Open Solutions For A Closed World / Anti-Spam Resources http://www.2mbit.com
ICQ: 8077511 No spam tolerated. By sending an e-mail to this account, your server may be subjected to an open relay/open proxy test as part of our ongoing efforts to reduce spam. Received on Mon Jan 13 12:24:23 2003