Problem collecting mail since 8th/9th - almost a s...

Question

Is anyone having or aware of any general problems or issues collecting email since about Wednesday night 8th/9th June? -- I use OE.
BT has been my ISP for several years, so I have BT addresses as well as some set up with a former ISP (tesco.net) which are also of course handled via the BT Yahoo account. All are set up correctly (I've checked the settings are in place as they should be, and haven't been varied/altered for any reason), and they've always all worked without any problems at all since joining BT.
But between switching off the system in the early hours of Thursday morning and booting up again later in the day, collecting mail has been a nightmare. At first it seemed as if clicking Send/Receive froze it up, but I realised later on it wasn't actually stalling altogether -- it's just very, VERY slow. For instance it takes the best part of an hour to download one small message of a line or two, maybe about 2kb.
Outgoing SMTP mail for both lots of accounts via mail.btinternet.com is no trouble at all and works completely normally at the usual speed and with no issues. Only incoming mail is affected, but I can't think it's anything to do with the Tesco POP3 address, because it's not only affecting mail on those accounts, but the BT ones as well (mail.btinternet.com again). They're all having the same problem.
Of course I can check both sets of inboxes online for incoming messages, but it's a hassle as I use the various different accounts for different categories of mail, so it's less straightforward than the convenience of a desktop client which I'm so used to, where they come in to one place and I'm able to browse all my mail from there, as well as store it on the system and compose at leisure offline. Online means logging in and out of each one individually. I just hate webmail... call me old-fashioned!
Internet browsing is unaffected, with Firefox (and IE). My BB package renewed at the beginning of the month and I changed from Option 3 to Option 2, but (a) this was about a week before the problem began, and (b) I'm not sure it would have any bearing anyway.
So any general issues anyone's aware of which are going on at the moment, or any ideas?
Many thanks.

Answer 1

I still have this problem. Yesterday I thought it might have sorted itself out, but no such luck. As I have several different email accounts (and they all have the same trouble whether it's a BT address or others from another ISP), I've only been trying to download mail for one account at a time (in turn) with OE, instead of all accounts at once.
Yesterday seemed no different to begin with, than it had been for the previous week -- clicked Receive for one of the accounts, the dialog box showed 3 messages to download, and as usual it was slow, slow, SLOW. The first message took all of about 50-55m to come in, and it was only 4kb! But then suddenly the other 2 following it came in at normal speed in a flash, as they should.
Tried another account where I knew there was mail in (having seen it on the server). They came in normally too. And so did all the rest of the accounts. Brilliant! -- I thought FINALLY, whatever the cause had been, I was through it. And I was thrilled as I'd been able to get all my mail in up to date at one sitting instead of the laborious process of going through each account in turn and having to walk away from the machine between them to do something else.
But a few hours later when I collected again, it was back to ultra-slow again. And today the same.
I've been searching around for some answers without a lot of luck: quite a few seem to report an overall slowness problem, or they're having problems sending mail out, but not so much my situation which only affects incoming mail. As I posted before, I can send normally, and the browser's also unaffected (so it's not the connection) -- it only happens with incoming mail.
Eventually I came across this 2009 page which seems to sum it up exactly:
http://www.nologinspace.com/show item.aspx?itemf=187&title=BT Internet POP Problems and Issues
There's no solution given, but it seems to nail the problem I'm having, and suggests it's some unknown issue to do with BT's POP servers.
Anyone come across this problem, or able to throw any more light on it? Or know what (if anything) can be done?
The only slight difference between their description and me is I don't get a timeout or error message, just sometimes the prompt "Your server has not responded in xxx seconds" and asking if I want to Stop or Wait. If that appears I tell it to wait, as my experience over the last week is the mail does arrive eventually if I wait long enough. Unlike them I haven't been deleting mail off the server either (except any spam), for the same reason. I've done that very occasionally in the past if one particular message persistently seems to be causing a logjam, but this doesn't strike me as one of those scenarios, because it's doing it over and over and over again, even when all previous mail has been cleared (excrutiatingly slowly!) from the accounts a few hours earlier, and every inbox is starting from empty with a completely new batch of different messages.
Any thoughts and possible solutions really appreciated.