downloading e-mail is blocking network

[krad]

On 19 May 2010 20:21, Chuck Swiger <cswiger at mac.com> wrote:

> Hi, Marco--
>
> On May 19, 2010, at 12:15 PM, Marco Beishuizen wrote:
> > 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?
>
> Are you using NAT?
>
> It sounds like something has a limited number of NAT state slots available,
> and is dropping connections past that limit.  It probably will help to try
> to serialize the activity of fetchmail / procmail so that they aren't
> opening new connections for every email being processed, if that is what is
> going on.
>
> Regards,
> --
> -Chuck
>
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I'd be surprised if its that as you would have to have 1000's of connections
open to cause an issue like that, even one a fairly low end router.

One simple way round would be to schedule your computer to turn on an hour
or so before you need to use it. A lot of bios have this feature these days