[plug] Strange TCP problem talking to Westnet pop3

[Cameron Patrick]

J Michael Gilks wrote:

> I am having the same problem here with two accounts.
> Like you I was blaming my system and doing anyting I can to try and fix the 
> problem.

Ahh, so I'm not the only one going mad then :-)

> I am running Mandrake 10.1 Community with kde, therefore kmail.

I presume that means a 2.6 kernel then?  My home gateway is still
running 2.4 and that can fetch messages from westnet just
fine... interesting.  Or maybe just coincidence.

> Have not tried any other mail agents.

I originally noticed the problem using fetchmail.  I then tried
talking POP3 to mail.westnet by hand to rule out fetchmail weirdness
and saw the same problem.

> I rang Westnet yesterday and they were mystified, but managed to delete a 
> couple of large, > 20kB, messages which had stalled the download.

FWIW you can delete the over-sized messages by using raw POP3
commands, if you're into that kind of thing:

$ telnet mail.westnet.com.au pop3
    blah blah connected
USER yourusername
    +OK blah blah
PASS yourpassword
    +OK blah blah
LIST
    +OK lots of messages
    list of message numbers and size of message
TOP 8 0
    +OK blah
    shows headers for message #8
DELE 8
    +OK
QUIT

> Is the machine in question running KDE 3.2 or later, if so this may
> be a kmail problem. Then again it may be something weird at the ISP.

No, it's a headless server with no KDE installed.

Cameron.