Sporadic Email account issue

[Magician]

Hi All,

I have clients telling me that they are not able to send/receive email on some of their accounts. I cannot see any pattern as to which email accounts work or not. This is happening on multiple hosting accounts. We also had issue with them logging into webmail. I have ran /scripts/fixwebmail and it complained about permissions errors.
I have ran /scripts/upcp --force and let cpanel upgrade, I have upgraded each mail component seperately also.
One client has sent me the error message he is getting.

There is an error message in outlook when you try to send and receive. It says something along the lines of 'the action timed out while waiting on a response from the server'

Can anyone shed any light on the issue and any possible fixes?

It appears to affect pop3/smtp and imap

TIA!

 

[SageBrian]

this may not answer your specific issues, but I've been running into a few scenarios with outgoing mail.

Virus Scanners: most virus scanners setup scanning of incoming/outgoing email as default. This adds a layer inbetween the mail program and the server.
Instead of Outlook --> SMTP Server, it becomes Outlook --> Virus Scan --> SMTP Server.
Depending on the scanner, and the speed of the upload, and the size of the message, there can be a delay that causes the server to timeout.

It does not help that people think nothing about sending large files over 5mb.

Disk Space: if the computer is running low on disk space, then it may have trouble sending large messages.
I just had a call yesterday from someone where their email was not leaving the outbox. However, it WAS being delivered, every few minutes.
Turns out, they had only 10mb left on the drive, and they were sending a 4mb file.
I'm assuming that the email needs to be spooled into temporary space?

As I just wrote that, I now wonder if they gave me correct info... 10mb of free space? can't be, unless we are in a time machine to 1994

Brian