[kwlug-disc] what is the probable cause of mail downloading being painfully slow?

[unsolicited]

Chris Frey wrote, On 12/27/2008 4:52 PM:
> Has anyone watched the POP3 protocol in action during these delays?
> Perhaps it is an overloaded server.
> 
> You can telnet to the POP3 port and do things manually as well, and see
> if the delay is seen there, or if it is just a fetchmail thing.
> 
> I can't imagine it would be a DNS issue between messages, since it is the
> same TCP connection.  If it was a DNS issue, it would have to be some odd
> configuration on the server side that had to look up a domain name for
> every email.

Perhaps not. Paul reported weird Rogers DNS issues not long ago. Or 
suppose the primary DNS provider doesn't have an answer for the query, 
and it's falling back to query the secondary. Since no answer 
resulted, the query is not locally cached, and each subsequent attempt 
goes through the same failure scenario. Or suppose the initial query 
is given up on and fetchmail moves on. Something akin to fetching a 
web page but the images within are not resolvable.