Question on setting up dovecot

[Jeffery Small]

The problem is solved!  A great thanks to everyone for all the valuable
information and suggestions you offered. I learned quite a bit, especially
about talking to the dovecot server using the telnet/openssl suggestions
and the available POP3 commands.

Many of you were correct about your diagnosis, but I had some things
happening that were creating confusion.  Here is a brief summary of what I
discovered.

There were a few initial dovecot configuration issues which I eventually
ironed out and, as I was reporting at the end of last week, the diagnostic
logs seemed to indicate that the connection was successful.  Yes, it turned
out that Outlook was indeed set to leave a copy of the emails on the server
for two weeks -- a setting hidden away on a sub-menu.  Now, why this did
not seem to be the case was because every time Outlook connected to the
Solaris system to retrieve mail, all the messages were immediately deleted
(despite this setting), so I was expecting the same behavior on the Linux
machine and wasn't looking for the setting.  There is something different
about how the pop3 handler is working on the two systems.

The second problem, which some of you guessed, was that the emails left
on the server were not being downloaded because when I wasn't looking,
Outlook had already downloaded and tagged them.  So, even when I thought
there was new mail (new to me anyway) in the inbox, Outlook had beaten me
to them so that when I looked, I could see no new mail flowing over to the
Windows machine.  Disabling the retention setting removed the ambiguity
and now I see any new mail in the inbox moving to the other system.

Thanks again to everyone!
--
Jeff