Solved: Outlook times-out downloading messages from certain POP3 providers

[John Kennedy]

Took me a long-time (2 weeks) to get this one sorted out but thanks to
several posts and some luck I was able to solve this problem.

In my case, I have two service providers; one works without problems
with Outlook 2000; the other hangs and times-out attempting to
download the messages. The issue was the MTU size associated with the
firewall appliance. It was set to 1500; setting it to 1460 completely
solved the problem.

Not surprizingly, many other connectivity problems (i.e., internet
radio) were also solved with this fix. Question is how come it changed
in the first place?

 

[neo [mvp outlook]]

1500 is the default for ethernet (network card) connections. Some types of
Cable/DSL connections require it to be lowered to take into account other
things that are going on.