Hi all,
I've been working with a client for a bit on a perplexing problem. They have
a small Sonicwall firewall which seems to work fine, except for one thing -
it sometimes blocks hotmail and yahoo mail access. 

Here are the symptoms: you can login to the hotmail website most of the
time, but not all the time. These times can be from one login to the next,
just minutes apart. Sometimes it will go to an error page in the web browser
saying the site is unavaliable. Also, once logged in, you can usually send
and receive mail, but not all the time. Sometimes you will not be able to
send mail - after clicking on send, nothing happens. Similar symptoms from
yahoo mail. 

Here's what I've already tried:
Thinking that what you pay for it what you get (nothing), I started with
blaming hotmail, but since the hotmail access was fine at almost same time
and with the same account and the same computer over a dial-up connection as
it wasn't working from behind the firewall. Also, I removed the firewall at
one point for a different reason and hotmail worked flawlessly during this
period of time. I tried getting in touch with hotmail tech support, hah, no
luck there, but I did stumble across the fact that you can use Outlook
Express or Outlook 2002/XP to access your hotmail account. Add a new account
and select HTTP and put in your hotmail account number and it goes. With
this in place behind the firewall there is never a problem with hotmail
access. I also called Sonicwall tech support and the techie there said that
there are no known issues with hotmail, just to try setting the security to
medium in IE. It already was. 

Has anyone run across this or know what may be going on? I'm not entirely
convinced that it's the firewall blocking it, but I can come up with no
other logical conclusion.

Thanks in advance,
Mitch Planck, CNE, CCNA

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