POP Mail Time Out, with slow connection
 

I have a machine running RHEL3 installed with PLESK (qmail)

some of my users are in china now and have problem checking their mail. Apparently the mail client (Outlook in this case) will just download mail until it halts halfway... then error showing that they were disconnected from the email server.

My guess is the China connection caused them to timeout.. but weird thing is.. why would it be able to download mail until the same one before it halts... its happening to 2 of my users over there, though I am not sure (and doubt so) that its because of the same mail...

saying that... what is the way i can trace or better still, rectify the problem.

I'm thinking of some reason

1) Poor connection that causes timeout

2) A particular mail that causes it

I've look through the log but don't find much.. or maybe.. i dunno what I am looking for.

Is there anyway to increase timeout duration for POP? What does qmail use to send mail?

Many thanks!

look in /var/log and do a grep -i for anything with qmail in it. if you are using qpopper, change 'qmail' to read 'qpopper'.

Check also your timeout settings in both Outlook and your /etc/ config files for qmail.

To have a look at the spool for that user, the easiest way to have a look at the size of their mail is:

$telnet yourmailserver.com 110

(replacing yourmailserver.com with your own server hostname, or 127.0.0.1 if it's the local machine)

you'll get something like this

+OK pop3 ready

type:
user <username of person in china with problem>
+OK

type:
pass <their password>
+OK logged in

then type:
LIST

have a look for some crazy large numbers in there. A typical mail will be around 500,000 bytes long, so it needs to be much bigger than than to be a problem.

Let me know how you go.

Al.