The Email Account Tester

The ScanDBX Email Account Tester allows ScanDBX to check the settings on your email or news accounts by attempting to connect to your email or news servers. When activated, the Email Account Tester will read your account information from your computer (including the encrypted passwords stored by Outlook Express) and use it to attempt to connect to your mail or news server(s). The ScanDBX Email Account Tester will currently test POP3, IMAP, SMTP, and NNTP servers. It also checks both normal and secure (ie. SSL-enabled) connections.

ScanDBX will not check accounts which use Secure Password Authentication.

When testing POP3 (incoming email) servers, the ScanDBX Email Account Tester attempts the following steps:

1. Connect to the server with the provided username and password.
2. Fetch the number of email messages stored at the server.
3. Disconnect.

When testing IMAP (incoming email) servers, the ScanDBX Email Account Tester attempts the following steps:

1. Connect to the server with the provided username and password.
2. Download a list of mailboxes on the server.
3. Disconnect.

When testing SMTP (outgoing email) servers, the Email Account Tester attempts the following steps:

1. Connect to the server with the provided username and password.
2. Send a test email to your email account.
3. Disconnect.

When testing NNTP (news) servers, the ScanDBX Email Account Tester attempts the following steps:

1. Connect to the server (with the provided username and password, if applicable).
2. Download a list of newsgroups on the server.
3. Disconnect.

ScanDBX only considers your account information to be correct if all three steps can be taken.

After each successful test of an SMTP server, you may find a test email in your Inbox. You can delete these emails, as they are no longer necessary.

While the Email Account Tester is testing your accounts, ScanDBX will display a dialog to show you what it is doing and its progress so far. Because it may take a few minutes to determine whether or not a mail server is responding, the progress bar may take a while to update. The animation of an email being repaired will continue to play during the account checking to let you know that ScanDBX is still doing work.

If you have any email accounts without saved passwords - that is, if you have opted not to save the account passwords in Outlook Express - ScanDBX will prompt you for these account passwords during the scan. If you enter the password, ScanDBX will test the account. If you select "Skip", ScanDBX will skip the account and continue.

Once ScanDBX has checked your email or news account settings with your email/news servers, it will either display the Account List Dialog (see the next section for details).