strange email problem

[drublic1019]

I am having a very strange pop3 problem with two of my users. I have a 1.5
mbps T-1 and MS ISA 2006. I have two visitors in the office this week who are
having trouble downloading their mail. Their outlook is setup to receive on
port 110 and send on port 587. They can send just fine but they cannot
receive their email all of the time. It is completely random. Yesterday
morning they could not receive then in the afternoon there was no problem.
Now this morning they could receive mail until about 11 then it started
erroring out again.

I have checked ISA and it is not blocking either of those ports and I can
see them going in and out. I have talk with my ISP and they confirmed they
are not block those port either. Which I would not think would be the issue
because if either was blocking it, it would never work.

I was wondering if the problem could be because the email server they are
contacting is in france and we are in texas. I have done a trace route on
both the inbound and outbound. The outbound takes 132 ms to reach it and the
inbound take 143 ms. I the time out in outlook is 3 minutes so that should be
more than enough time.

Does anyone have any idea what could cause this? Could this be an issue
with ISA because they are not part of my domain?

 

[mofusjtf]

I doubt your problem is with ISA. Since it works some of the time it seems that maybe the server in France is performing a task on non-peak hours which would be peak hours for you in Texas. Just a thought.