POP3 connection string for livemail or gmail?

I have a third party application that requires a 'POP 3 connection string'. I'd never heard of such a thing but apparently it looks something like this :

 Line 314; connection string: {pop3.live.com:995/pop3/ssl}INBOX

or

 {outlook.XXXXXXXX.net:993/imap/ssl/novalidate-cert}INBOX

The problem is I can't seem to create a connection string for some either Live mail or Gmail that works.

The application - (which is trying to connect to the POP3 account to process email bounces) - just gives an error.

I just cant seem to find ANY documentation anywhere about POP 3 connection strings. I assume it must be some kind of standard.

The tech support for the product in question said "Ask Microsoft for the connection string for Windows Live mail". I don't think its w开发者_StackOverfloworth the effort trying to ask - but hoped someone here could shed some light on the issue.

Perhaps a POP3 connection testing tool would be useful too?

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About the "POP 3 connection strings" part, maybe this RFC can help you : RFC 2384 - POP URL Scheme :

A POP URL is of the general form:

pop://<user>;auth=<auth>@<host>:<port>

About the URL for gmail... Not that simple ; maybe the code example in [this article][2] can help ; there is a comment in the code that says :

/*
 * Access Gmail POP account
 */
/*
 $message_file='pop3://'.$user.':'.$password.'@pop.gmail.com:995/1?tls=1&debug=1&html_debug=1';
  */

With a bit of luck, maybe something like this could work in your application too ?