A very strange problem that happened on an exchange server 2013 CU12: I enabled the two imap backend and imap services for a helpdesk that works by reading the messages by imap protocol.
The very strange thing is that by doing a telnet on port 143 from any other machine on the network I was not getting the typical banner of the imap service, I obtained only a blank screen, while locally it was answering correctly:
With the command “Get-HealthReport ServerName” I actually saw that the service IMAP.Proxy was actually offline
What I tried to do was to put it back online:
Set-ServerComponentState -Identity ServerName -Component ImapProxy -State Active -Requester HealthAPI
Within 30 seconds, the service has begun to respond properly and I saw it online with Get-HealthReport:
Unfortunately, however, I must also point out that after about 1 month of operation I found the service hanged again.
I had to re-launch the command to re-activate it….. then as a workaround I'll have to schedule Set-ServerComponentState so that it runs from time to time, ugly solution but as I said is a workaround….