hi there

i'm hosting about 175 email accounts on a courier-based pop3/imap email server.

most of the pop3 accounts are fetched from single users. 5 accounts are fetched from a shared internet line (nat) where i always had trouble with.

there's always one person who get's a timeout connecting to the mailserver. the mailsettings are okay, somtimes the mails come in. sometimes the mails arrive successfully and then there a lot's of hours (10am till 1pm) where the mails cannot be downloaded.

the default value of courier is MAXPERIP:4. of course i changed this default to 8,99,700 but had no luck with that.

maybe the courier does not load the config file at startup? it is located with a standard gentoo-installation in /etc/courier-imap/pop3d

how can i dump the settings of a running courier to verify the maxperip parameter?

another user has simular problems: he gets the timeout as well but uses imap to connect to the mailserver. mailclientsettings are correct as well. he claims that rebooting the workstation and rebooting his nat-router and modem does somitimes affect the behavior: he sais: "without reboot, there's no chance to get the mailserverconnection running back again - although google, skype and all the other internet services are running properly"

i noticed that the mailserver has enough cpu power (100%idle) but not enough ram (512mb) - i'm going to upgrade to 1gb tonight.

10:46:53 mx4 /etc/courier-imap # free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 480584 467276 13308 0 19676 114800 -/+ buffers/cache: 332800 147784 Swap: 3886156 141840 3744316

top - 10:48:12 up 167 days, 11:05, 6 users, load average: 0.18, 0.12, 0.13 Tasks: 153 total, 2 running, 151 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 0.0% us, 1.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 99.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si Mem: 480584k total, 474356k used, 6228k free, 20168k buffers Swap: 3886156k total, 141840k used, 3744316k free, 96420k cached

10:48:24 mx4 /etc/courier-imap # uptime 10:48:24 up 167 days, 11:06, 6 users, load average: 0.14, 0.11, 0.13

regards, armin.