Hi, new to Pegasus mail due to a client of mine that uses it and will not switch to anything else. She is having an issue with sending mail and getting a 'connection timed out' error message. She has the latest Norton 360 protection software, but nothing in the Norton posts seemed to resolve this issue. Her account information is correct and I can use Outlook Express with the same account information and it works fine. I got it working briefly, but then it stops after sending only a few messages. It seems that if the message que is empty, she can send a new message okay. If the message que has any messages waiting to be sent, it will not send anything and gives the 'connection timed out' error. I have reinstalled, updated to the 4.41 version, uninstalled Norton and talked with the ISP to verify account settings. Again, email works fine in OE 6.0, just not Pegasus.
Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!
On 14 Jun 2007 Pegasus Mail & Mercury - Automated Email <> wrote:
> Hi, new to Pegasus mail due to a client of mine that uses it and will
> not switch to anything else. She is having an issue with sending mail
> and getting a 'connection timed out' error message. She has the
> latest Norton 360 protection software, but nothing in the Norton posts
> seemed to resolve this issue. Her account information is correct and
> I can use Outlook Express with the same account information and it
> works fine. I got it working briefly, but then it stops after sending
> only a few messages. It seems that if the message que is empty, she
> can send a new message okay. If the message que has any messages
> waiting to be sent, it will not send anything and gives the
> 'connection timed out' error. I have reinstalled, updated to the 4.41
> version, uninstalled Norton and talked with the ISP to verify account
> settings. Again, email works fine in OE 6.0, just not Pegasus.
You need to see what's going on. Go to File | Network configuration | General and turn on "Create Internet session logs (advanced diagnostic use only)"
Checking this control tells Pegasus Mail to create special log files that show the entire exchange of information between it and the servers it connects to. Each session will be created in a file called TCPxxxx.WPM in your home mailbox directory (the "xxxx" is replaced by four digits). Creating session logs will slow down the performance of your system somewhat, and you should be aware that any username and password information exchanged between Pegasus Mail and the server will be shown in the log, *even* if you use SSL to secure the connection. Session logs are primarily useful if you need to debug a problem between Pegasus Mail and one of the servers it connects to - you should enable the option only on instructions from a system administrator or from Pegasus Mail technical support. [ Technical note: this control has the same effect as using a "-Z 32" commandline switch when you run Pegasus Mail ]
You can now try again to send/receive the mail and then look at the resulting TCP/IP debug file. Review of this file will tell you exactly what is going on between WinPMail and the server.
If you continue to get timeouts there may be a packet fragmentation problem. A 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.
>
> Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!
>
Thomas, thanks for the info. I will check the MTU settings and see if that is indeed part of the problem. Your input regarding the NVidia chipset is probably the answer though. I did think about adding another NIC just to see if it was an issue with it, but didn't have one with me at the time. I will try these suggestions and get back with you!
It appears that the nVidia chipset of the onboard NIC was the issue. I made the changes suggested by Thomas and it seems to be working just fine now. Thanks for the help!
[quote user="CheetosKid"]It appears that the nVidia chipset of the onboard NIC was the issue.[/quote]
Just a quick note to say that I had the same problem, and thanks to this thread I was able to fix it.
However I though it might be worth mentioning some of the other symptoms:
(1) Very small emails (<1k) were still getting sent.
(2) I installed Thunderbird to find out whether this was a general issue and discovered that Thunderbird didn't appear to be affected by the problem.
(3) Prior to this issue arising I'd had a problem with AVG, which had gone haywire and had to be uninstalled and reinstalled - this was after I'd switched my PC on, but left it alone for an hour or so. I'm wondering whether all of the problems were caused by an automatic Windows update? (I have XP Home SP2)
