[kwlug disc.] Email problems

[unsolicited]

This happens to me regularly, but I'm on Rogers.

Who is your provider? (You're in/near Listowel if I recall correctly.)

Can you say that it happens at any particular time of day?

When I run into this, I'm never certain whether it's my provider, my 
local network, the public network, the remote server, or the OS / 
thunderbird.

So I've started doing pings and tracert's, if not to the remote server 
directly (due to not accepting pings), then to something else on the 
same network. More importantly, I've started looking to see if I can 
get to the server in other ways. e.g. telnet {server} on port 110, how 
about http, https, or ssh.

I have confidence in my provider.

[In my case, I believe the problem is with Rogers, intermittently, 
doing funny things with encrypted traffic. e.g. tls to my mail server. 
The tests above have shown to be the problem not the network or the 
machine, but the ISP shaping traffic or something.]

Insurance Squared Inc. wrote, On 02/04/2008 11:07 AM:
> I have sporadic problems with getting my email off of my server.  
> Running Linux (though it's happening on all the machines on my home 
> network) through a home router, through a dsl modem and over to my 
> Mandrake server.
> 
> What happens is when I use thunderbird to download my email from my 
> account on my server, it sits and spins for quite a while.  Then it 
> seems to connect and download fine.  Uploading emails is instant. Web 
> traffic is instant as well.  It's only downloading email from my server 
> to all the machines on my home network that has this problem.
> 
> Also it seems sporadic.  It's been doing it for a few days now nonstop.  
> Prior to that it hadn't done it in a few months.  It almost acts like 
> it's having nameserver problems like where it waits for one nameserver 
> and times out to go to the second.  But I'm not having any ns problems.
> 
> My email client says it's connected immediately, but I don't see the 
> connection in the logs on the server until after the delay.  It's not my 
> end computer since it happens on different email accounts on different 
> computers at home here.
> 
> I've powered down and up my router and modem.  No change.
> 
> I'm stumped - any thoughts on how to diagnose this further?
> 
>