downloading e-mail is blocking network

[Marco Beishuizen]

Hi,

I'm having a strange network problem. Every day, when I turn on my 
computer, fetchmail is started and procmail is putting all my mail in the 
correct mailboxes. This takes some time because I receive a few hundred 
e-mails a day (mostly mailing lists).

The strange thing is that when the e-mail is being downloaded, all other 
network traffic seems blocked. So browsing the internet is not possible 
when fetchmail/procmail is busy. At first I thought I had a problem with 
DNS and/or DHCP and/or my ADSL modem because after a reset of the modem, 
the problem mostly went away, and there were some "hostname not found" 
errors in my logfiles. But today I just waited for a while and discovered 
that when fetchmail/procmail is finished, the internet suddenly was 
reachable again.

So has anyone has seen fetchmail/procmail blocking network traffic before?

Regards,
Marco

-- 
You may my glories and my state dispose,
But not my griefs; still am I king of those.
 		-- William Shakespeare, "Richard II"