We saw this problem fairly frequently. The clients in question were running Outlook XP, connecting to a qpopper-4.0.4 server on the same very lightly loaded LAN. Diddling with chunky-writes or Outlook's timeout values did no good.
A google search pointed to a bug in Outlook XP (shocking!), wherein Outlook gets confused if the server responds "too quickly". See the "I frequently get a timeout" question at: http://www.workgroupmail.com/faq_area.asp?area=Client%20Setup&id=34 and: http://home.hetnet.nl/~ojb-hamster/EnWIP/EnWeb/html/faq18om.htm The URLs above both suggest configuring the server to pause for 50ms between POP commands. I changed qpopper to do that, which boils down to a "usleep(50*1000)" call in popper.c, just before the pop_get_command() call. Haven't seen the problem since. I can provide a patch on request. Cheers, -- Ken Lalonde, Global Remittance Network, Toronto
