One email problem after another
Over the weekend, my Internet access was spotty. The connection in my room was stuttering on and off every few seconds at one point. Outgoing mail was particularly a problem; I couldn't email my reading for the wedding to the front desk to print out for me, nor could I send SH autoresponses reliably. (About one in every 3 to 5 attempts to send an autoresponse would succeed.)
Managed to check and send mail at Michael & Lisa's on Sunday. But now I'm back at their place, and I tried checking mail tonight.
And Mail.app successfully retrieved mail from all but my main account, where the password timed out.
I tried telnetting to port 110 and issuing a USER command and a PASS command. It took about 2 minutes for the PASS command to be accepted. Mail.app apparently times out after about 1 minute. I Googled for info on changing the timeout, and found two or three forum postings in various forums where people have asked how to change the timeout, but no answers. In at least one case, the poster was mocked for having a slow POP3 account.
Figured I could at least use the old-fashioned UNIX mail interface in my shell account. Logged in, ran the command. Received error message: "/: write failed, filesystem is full".
Called Pair tech support. They're closed.
Looked at filesize on the mailbox in question. It's 115MB. No idea whether that's significantly bigger than usual. If it is, that would explain the full-filesystem problem.
Decided to download Eudora mail, because Eudora can delete junk mail from the server mailbox. Was hesitant because I haven't downloaded mail with Eudora in a week and a half, so there's a lot of it sitting on the server. Decided to try.
During the first 2000 messages (in a secondary mailbox), Eudora hung three times in close succession.
I finally managed to look at my main mailfile using the UNIX utility less, but that's not a good way to read mail--only did a search for the most urgent thing I was expecting.
Meanwhile, I'm falling asleep at the keyboard, due to very little sleep last night.
(Side note: when I tried to listen to my falling-asleep music last night after realizing I couldn't sleep, it sounded like it was playing about twice the usual speed, much too fast to be relaxing. I listened to bits of it again after waking up this morning and found that it's playing at normal speed. I don't know whether my time perception changed or whether I was half-dreaming or what. Odd.)
So I think the only thing I can do is go sleep. Perhaps the problems will have fixed themselves in the morning.
There have been many wonderful things about this trip, but I will be very very happy to be home in a couple of days.
