Hello!
One of my friends have strange problems with pop3. Situation: my server is located in Slovakia (Europe) pop3 client (Outlook, Mozilla) in Australia.
On server - courier pop. On clinet - OutlookExpress - WinXP.
Till yesterday (12.4.) everything worked fine for more than 1 year.
Now he (my friend in Australia) can't download any mail from my server via pop3. The Outlook didn't receive any message, it makes LOGIN. But then nothings happens and I see only DISCONNECTED in courier logs. Other accounts are accessed by people in slovakia and it works fine.
I'm playing with it more than 6 hours I think that problem isn't on mine or his side, but maybe I need a diffrent point of view :).
So what I did (through VNC I've tried it from Australia):
1) telnet pop3-server 110 can login can do any STAT, LIST, UIDL - as much as I can RETR 1 - hooks tcpdump shows that ack packets weren't coming back or were comming with delay about minute, but only when huge date should be transfered (small traffic like list, uidl, ... works fine)
2) can't receive any mail from my server (diffrent pop3 accounts)
3) connecting another pop3 server in slovakia (other ISP - everything works fine)
4) redirect pop traffic from well working server (3) to my server - telnet session worked fine (including retr) It seems that it have quicker responses than direct pop3 connection to my serever (strange). Even more strange is that from my server has lower packet loss to australia than the server mentioned in 3).
Now when I've finished the email. Tried it again. I was able to make 4 times "retr 1" with quite quick response (about 2-5 sec), the fifth try takes about 30 seconds (it is small test email). The outlook (with extedning the timeout to max 5 minutes) can receive the emials very very slowly - it download 1 message and timeouts.
Do you have any ideas where can be the problem? Maybe it just temporary error somwhere in the net and it will disappear suddently as it appears, but I saw something like that first time (maybe I'm lucky man ;).
With regards
Miroslav Zervan
