22901 - Checkpoint VPN dropped mail connections.

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(MailNews Core :: Networking, defect, P3)

Description

[Michael Collette]

Let's see if I can properly explain this.  If not, I'll be checking back on
this one later to answer any questions about it.  My company runs a Checkpoint
Firewall-1 on an NT Server for a connection to the Internet.  All of our
computers are running behind this firewall, and are otherwise not accessible to
the outside world.
  In order to log in remotely to get E-Mail or access other network services a
client machine needs to have their Secure Remote software installed.  On NT this
goes in as a service, on 98 it installs as a network adapter binding to TCP/IP.
Like other VPN services it isn't active unless I'm requesting traffic from my
company's LAN through the firewall.  When I do point that way it kicks in with
authenticating the user and encrypting all the traffic between the client and
firewall.  Yeah, a VPN.
  For some reason Mozilla's mail client doesn't work trying to talk through
this.  This is NOT a proxy issue.  The web browser doesn't seem to have any
problems getting through.  When trying to get mail it is able to make initial
contact with the mail server behind the firewall, it then requests and appears
to send a password to it.  It even gets a count of the messages waiting to be
downloaded, but then hangs.
  I would like to stress the point that this is not a Proxy issue since the
Secure Remote software works at the network layer behind the scenes.  Mozilla is
the only mail client I've tried that hasn't been able to successfully get through.
  I fully realize how vague this is, and I can't exactly post publicly how to
get through my company's firewall for your testing.  Still, this seems to be a
pretty vital aspect of Mozilla not working at the networking level and I thought
it best to get this documented.

Comment 1

[Michael Collette]

This now appears to be functioning, therfore I'm moving the status to Fixed.
I'll continue to track the functionality of this to make sure it doesn't break
somewhere along the line.  Whatever happened now has it working really nice.

Comment 2

[Scott MacGregor]

I like it when I fix a bug and didn't realize it. Thanks for keeping an eye on 
this metrol.

Comment 3

[lchiang]

We don't have Checkpoint VPN here to try this out so I'll go ahead and mark 
verified per your comments.  Your input to test this functionality and file any 
new bugs is appreciated!

Comment 4

[[e-mail]]

change summary to be more desc.

I'm going to assume (based on your desc) that this was IMAP.

Just for the record, can you list the mail packages that did work?

Some firewalls can be very specific in what they block. If this happens again, a
packet trace or imap log is probably needed to understand the problem.