Topic: Slow Pop and Time out using Outlook

[Redgt97]

Can't figure this one out E-Smith working great but when you try and connect with outlook says connecting and waits some times out then connects right after the time out, other time just takes for ever then downloads at great speed, top says nothing becomming a cpu hog. Squirrel mail seems to be fine accessing, please help I have an MX record pointing fine. Please help me!!!

Dave

[Patrick Hickey]

Not enough detail to make a serious stab at helping...but off the top of my head..

* Outlook is the least efficient IMAP I ave ever seen, period. It seems to thrash much of the time in convoluted MS foo...but I digress...

- it /sounds/ like reverse DNS is possibly misbehaving. Is your Outlook client configured to use the e-smith as Primary DNS? Telnet to the e-smith and use nslookup to verify both DNS and reverse DNS are working properly.

- make sure you configure Outlook to only look for new messages in the INBOX or it'll beat itself to death checking ALL folders for new mail.

Hope this help.

regards,

patrick

[Redgt97]

OK sorry, I have outlook configured using my mx record name mail.davejill.com it is configured as pop3 it is slow connecting via ftp and telnet or using putty. I tried a fix posted earlier with slow times but didn't fix it. It has been working fine but one day I noticed that outlook said connecting then it just sits if you tell outlook to check for mail it waits and most of the time times out but if you start outlook it will say connecting then just wait it will start downloading messages. Thanks

[Michiel van Es]

Connect to the E-smith server and edit the hosts file in /etc/hosts.
put all clients hostnames//FQDN and ip-adresses in that file.
It IS a problem with reverse DNS..i had the same problem on my Suse box.
Filling the correct hostanmes and ip-adresses in the hosts file solved my problem.

Greetz,

MichielvE

[Redgt97]

ok I understand some of that but what does the hostnames//FQDN  mean? I need to put the workstations in the the hosts file? or my MX record name? sorry for the dumb question

[Michiel van Es]

It is not a dumb question
I had to figure it out myself first.
there is a file in /etc called hosts
Edit it with vi or joe or whatever.
You'll see this:
127.0.0.1   localhost.local localhost

Fill in the ip-adressen and the clients who are connecting to this machine
In teh end it will look like:

127.0.0.1  localhost.local  localhost
192.168.0.3  mitch.myself-inc.com  mitch
192.168.0.4  barry.myself-inc.com  barry
192.168.0.12  steven.myself-inc.com steven

That's it!

Now there should be no problem at all while connecting to the pop3 server or using ssh.

good luck!

M.