Exchange 2003 POP3 authentication failure (bug?)

I've been whitnessing a strange behaviour in the Exchange 2003 POP3 service and, after some testing, it looks like it's actually a bug.

The symptoms: if an user's login name is different from his Exchange alias, the POP3 service won't accept his Windows username, but only his UPN one.

Example:

Domain: test.local
NetBIOS domain: TEST
User's login name: john
User's UPN: john@xxxxxxxxxx
User's Exchange alias: johnny
User's e-mail address: johnny@xxxxxxxxxx

In this case, the user won't be able to log in to the POP3 service using either "john" or "TEST\john" (which normally both work), but only using john@xxxxxxxxxxx

I've been able to reproduce this behaviour in a test environment much more simple than the production one where I first whitnessed it (the actual production environment involves two Active Directory domains, a back-end Exchange cluster, three front-end load balanced ones, POP3 with SSL and some other things).

The test environment only contained a single Windows 2003 domain controller and domain (2003 functionality level for both domain and forest, Exchange native mode), with a single Exchange 2003 server running on Windows 2003. Both systems and Exchange where updated to the latest service packs and hotfixes.

The issue repeated exactly as described above.

Any help (including a bug acknowledgement from Microsoft people) would be really appreciated.


Massimo

.

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