Eircom flatrate mail problems

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A friend has been having problems connecting to the main Indigo POP3 server (pop.indigo.ie) since around Tuesday/Wednesday. mail.eircom.net is similarly affected.

The connection opens okay, but it takes forever (60 seconds or more) for the POP3 server to respond with the initial "+OK" message - sometimes as much as five minutes. This can be easily seen by typing:

telnet pop.indigo.ie 110

at a DOS prompt. This means that pulling down new email takes forever, and indeed sometimes the mail client gives up before the server has responded. It's very frustrating.

This ONLY occurs when they use the flatrate 1893150150 number to dial-up. If they use 1892150150, the server responds immediately. (It also responds immediately for me when I try it via broadband). They are on the Nutley Dublin exchange.

Any other Eircom flatrate users seen this behaviour, especially people in the Dublin 4 area? It's only started happening in the last few days.

(We've been onto Indigo twice, but it's quite difficult to convince them that yes, this is a network problem and not some simple client misconfiguration.)

vibe666

yep, getting the same thing (in D2 though, on different exhcnage to yourself).

Seems it might be to do with €ircon's new 'advertising' [for advertising read: spamming] campaign to try and get flatrate customers to sign up to their broadband offerings. see this thread here: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&postid=1665934#post1665934 for more info.

Seems they are either redirecting DNS requests or similar to bring you this advert in your browser window whenever you try and surf. i think it's supposed to only come up occasionally in new browser windows but in my experience it seems to happen far too frequently to the point where the service is almost unusable.

see the info i posted in the other post for the person in eircom.net to contact to get removed from this particular instance of eircom spam.

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Rang Indigo tech support again at 12:30 and they agreed to remove the pop-up ads for this account. As of now (around 2 PM), email is working fine once again.

So, whatever they are using to do the ad stuff is interfering with normal POP3 mail access on port 110. (I checked the IP address used and the correct mail server is being contacted, so I don't think this particular case is down to DNS requests being intercepted; it's the TCP connection itself.)

Anyway, I highly recommend that anyone else suffering strange problems like this get straight onto Eircom (or Indigo) and get the ads turned off for their account, as described by Vibe.

vibe666

i got onto a mate at eircom.net support today who told me how to get around the mail problems.

i added it to the end of that other thread, just for future reference.

glad you got it fixed though.

did you know eircom and indigo tech support is the same office. smae guys take both lots of calls and just greet you slightly differently depending on what line you come in on.

sneaky buggers that they are.

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Yep, I figured that out when the support person said "Eircom technical support", even though I'd rung the Indigo number :-)