Thanks for the quick response. 

I had previously increased the timeout, obviously that had not worked.  I have now followed your suggestions on the MTU and hopefully that will take care of things. 

I guess time will tell if this takes care of the problem.

Thanks again.

I have a problem that seems to be occuring more frequently.  I am running XP w/ Pmail 4.41.  Every so often pmail goes to download the new messages (downloading 1 of 20....), it will download the first few messages then stop.  If I check for new messages again it will say the same thing, downloading 1 of 20..., and will download the same messages as before creating duplicates and then stop at the same place.  As the day goes on the messages on the server keep building (downloading 1 of 25, downloading 1 of 32, etc...), but pmail only download the same couple messages and then stops.  From what I can figure out is it "does not like" one of the messages and errors out.  It must not mark the already downloaded messages as being downloaded until it sucessfully receives all messages, therefore it keeps downloading the same ones over and over. 

 The only solution I have come up with is to launch Outlook, or Outlook webmail and delete out the messages, until the message that was causing the problem is deleted and then pmail starts acting normally again.  There does not appear to be anything "funny" about the messages that it errors out on, but pmail seems to have an issue when Outlook does not.

 Has anyone seen this and have a solution?

 Thanks.

The only solution I have come up with is to launch Outlook, or

Outlook webmail and delete out the messages, until the message that was

causing the problem is deleted and then pmail starts acting normally

again.  There does not appear to be anything "funny" about the messages

that it errors out on, but pmail seems to have an issue when Outlook

does not.

 Has anyone seen this and have a solution?

Sounds like there is a TCP/Ip timeout problem or maybe one of packet fragmentation.  The first thing to do to to go to the POP3 setup and increase the timeout to something like 180 seconds to see if this fixes the problem.  

If it does not then I do suspect packet fragmentation.  The POP3/SMTP transmissions may fail if the MTU packet size is so large that a packet is fragmented.  In many cases the receiving system router blocks the receiving servers "packets fragmented" response to the sending system using "MTU Discovery".  These oversize packets are not accepted and so are resent.  This results in a timeout, generally at the end of the message transmission but it can be anywhere in the process.  You need to reduce the MTU size. Windows defaults to a 1500 MTU and many routers and DSL connections need 1492.  You might simply want to turn off the MTU Discovery operation.

You might want to get a copy of SG TCP Optimizer that I find quite handy.  http://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php  This little utility will allow you to test your MTU for maximum size without fragmentation against specific servers.  If will also make it easy to adjust the MTU. 

And finally, does this computer, by chance, happen to have an NVidia NForce 4 chipset on the motherboard?  If so, many other have had this exact problem, and it turned out to be an optimization setting for the built in NIC which caused the problems with packet fragmentation. Disabling the advanced optimization capability called "checksum offload" made all the problems of sending SMTP mail via WinPMail disappear.