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Email Forwarding Service
Getting Started


Once you installed the software you need to configure it before it can be used, this page will go through the minimum steps you need to go through and to consider in order to start using the service.

Make the system where poprep has been installed meets the System Requirements.

Granting Admin Rights: First, you should decide who will be administering the service. Poprep has been designed as a background service, meaning it's not typically running interactively by a user. It also has a management interface and this is naturally run by a user. By default a local administrator can administer the service, so if you are an Administrator there are no additional configuration required. If you run a locked down environment you may want to grant management privileges to a different account, to do so add that user to the local group PopRepAdmins. You can do so using the Windows Computer Management Console, or the control panel applet "Users Accounts".  You can also use the POPCONF.EXE tool as it provides an easy way for you to add a user account to the management group. We would strongly recomend that you ALWAYS add any one that will be administering the service to the PopRepAdmins group. (Note, the Installer will always add the useraccount of the person installing the service to this group.)

Example: Adding aPopCnf.exe /AddToAdmin:<UserName>

Once you added a user to the PopRepAdmins group, if you are logged on as the added user, you must logout and log back on to Windows for the change of membership to take effect. Alternatively - you can restart the system.


NOTE: Windows Vista and later, using UAC (User Account Control)
In a default installation of Windows Vista you will be able to manage the service if you are an administrator, this even if you run the console using the restricted token since the admin console take advantage of the Admin Service for privileged operations. But you MAY experience difficulties when creating/editing event scripts. Should that be the case, please ensure the user account is a member of the "PoprepAdmins" group.


Starting the Admin Console the first time: Next, you launch the Poprep Admin Console. If this is the first time you start the console, it will ask you for licence information. It will also give you the option to evaluate the software (30 days).

Creating a Configuration File: Following this, it will ask you to greate a new configuration file, and to set a password for the file. This password is used to encrypt sensitive data. You will need this password in the future should you copy the configuration file to an other computer. Appart from that you will never again be asked for this password.

You are now ready to start configuring and using the service, you can go through these steps in any order, but they are listed here in the recomended order.

Global Settings:
Poprep is as you know a service that recieves emails from any POP3, EWS (Microsoft Exchange Web Service) or Outlook Web Access (OWA) account, and it sends them on using the SMTP protocol. In most instances you will only have a single SMTP server that you forward the mails to. So the first thing we should do is to configure the system so that we can use this server for all/any connector. You will find the configuration dialog on the Main Menu under Settings, Global Server Settings or if you right click on the connectors node in the tree view. For a detailed description of the configuration options see: GLOBAL SMTP

NOTE: If required you can override the global SMTP settings for any induvidual mailbox connector.


Create a new Connector: To create a new connector, click on the New Connector icon or in the tree view, right click and select New Connector. Select connector type (POP3,OWA,EWS), give a unique name for the connector, and once confirmed, the configuration interface for the connector is opened.

Inbound Settings: Fill in hostname, user (mailbox) and password under Inbound (POP3). And what authenticaiton protocols to use. If you are not sure about what authentication protocol to use, you can select all and POPREP will determine the best supported protocol to use.

Routing: As a Minimum, you MUST fill in the MailTo field on the Routing tab with a valid email address to forward any emails recieved through this connector to. Failing to fill in this information will not allow you to enable the connector, but it will remain disabled.

Outbound Settings: You can optionally choose to override the SMTP server used for this specific connector if you wish, by default the Global Settings created earlier will be used.

Enable the Connector: To enable the connector, go to the tab Schedule and tick Enabled. NOTE Should any properties be missing, like the Username once saved the connector will be disabled untill you have corected these.

Start the Service: You can now start the service by pressing the "play" button and it should start recieve and forward your emails.


Additional configuration steps:
Configuring the service to start Automatically: You can configure Poprep to start forwarding messages as soon as you switch on your computer. You do so by configuring the service to Auto Start, this can be done from the Admin Console (Settings, Global Settings, Service Configuration), or the Microsoft Services management console.

Antivirus Software: If you have an antivirus scanner installed on the computer where Poprep is running, it may in some instances interfere with messages that Poprep stores in the Queue folders. If you experiencing these kind of dififculties, you may have to configure your AV Scanner to exclude these folders when it's looking for viruses. Most scanners can also be configured not to scan files opened by a specific process, if your scanner have this ability, you may want to configure it not to scan any files opened by the process poprep.exe. If you want to scan messages as they are recieved, you should consider using an Event Script, and call you AV Scanner from the event script for each message.

Logging: Some POP3 and SMTP servers are know to provide incorrect information about what protocol they support, this MAY cause Poprep to fail when connecting to the server, and even if Poprep may be able to choose a different protocol automatically, it may have to reconnect to the server more than once causing unneccesary traffic and delays. In those insances you may have to or want to disable the offending protocol.

Should you have a problem connecting to a server, you can enable full logging/debug output and you will be able to see the negotiation messages that is being sent to/from the server and from this you can determine what protocol that is failing. You can also run PopRep Interactively from a command prompt, and you can then from the command prompt select that additional debug information is displayed to the console.