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Slow POP3 response

iklesteve
Newbie
Posts: 10
Registered: ‎18-04-2007

Slow POP3 response

Hi all -
My Father has a legacy Freenetname ADSL account that, via madasafish, is now administered by PN. He uses the standard Mail client in Windows Vista to retrieve his mail using POP3 from the two custom mailboxes that I have set up.
Over the last two weeks, he has noticed it taking longer and longer for Mail to complete the authorisation and download phases of email, especially during working hours - although it seems ok if he tries at midnight. I've checked the mailbox for any large e-mails that may have stuck and can't find anything over a few hundred KB.
Typically, it is now taking 30 seconds for the client to authorise and > 3 minutes to download new mail - which never is more than half a dozen messages totaling a 100KB or so as he leaves his PC on most of the day and Mail is set to send/receive every 30 mins or so. He is on a stable 2-3MB ADSL line and other internet browsing is unaffected and running normally. I got him to run a trace to the mail server during one of these slow downloads, which seems normal - the results are pasted below.

Tracing route to mail.freenetname.co.uk [212.159.8.233]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    1 ms    1 ms    <1 ms  xx.xx.xx.xx
  2    25 ms    24 ms    25 ms  lo1.ptn-ag03.plus.net [195.166.128.43]
  3    25 ms    26 ms    25 ms  gi2-19.ptn-gw01.plus.net [84.92.3.45]
  4    38 ms    39 ms    39 ms  gi3-0.pih-cr1.plus.net [212.159.1.177]
  5    55 ms    38 ms    40 ms  if25.pih-lb03.plus.net [212.159.0.17]
  6    39 ms    39 ms    38 ms  mail.freenetname.co.uk [212.159.8.233]

I'm on the brink of deleting his mailbox and recreating it to see if that helps but before I do that I was wondering if anyone else has any suggestions as to what could be causing this. Do PN apply any traffic shaping to madasafish circuits that could be throttling POP3 traffic during the day? Could anyone from PN confirm the madasafish email infrastructure is working OK?
Cheers,
Steve