pop3 timeout problems.

[Etienne Ledoux]

Greetings,

I've recently changed/upgraded our mailserver to a new enviroment.
I'm using postfix, courier-imap on my mailservers and I keep the mailboxes on 
a shared nfs drive. Since the move we have been having a few complaints about 
timeouts while downloading mail via pop3.

These timeouts would occur on small and large mailboxes, with only a few 
messages in them. The client has a diginet line which isn't saturated. The 
connection would start out ok and then it just slows down to a grinding halt 
and eventually times out. One thing we have noticed is that all the 
complaints are coming from users using Windows XP. We have tested downloading 
from the same windows xp machine using outlook and outlook express and the 
same thing would happen. But if we downloaded the same mailbox from a 
different machine using windows 98 on the same lan using the same diginet 
connection the mail downloads quickly without a problem (we also tried 
different network cables). We have other clients experiancing the exact same 
problem and they are also windows xp users on diginet lines.

I mount the nfs share from my bsd boxes using the -r=8192,-w=8192 option.

The servers are handling allot of mail daily but aren't under extreme heavy 
load.

I haven't tried lowering the MTU and I haven't tried another pop3 server yet. 
But this will be my next steps to try and solve the problem.

Could this be a problem with windows xp (why wasn't it a problem before I did 
the move ?)

What could be causing this ?
Any ideas, suggestions ?
What can I do to try and fix this.

tx.
e.