Hi,
Just wanted to warn people about a problem that we've been struggling with for over a week, in the hope that this might be useful to the next person to hit it...
We have Vodafone home broadband. 2 of us use local mail client's (Thunderbird) to download emails using the POP3 protocol over SSL/TLS.
Just over a week ago, both copies of Thunderbird stopped downloading email - they seemed to stall before even logging in to the server. The mail client running on Windows didn't report an error at all, just stopped, but Thunderbird on Linux reported that "the connection was refused".
After a lot of investigation with our email provider, we've found the cause and a fix.
The cause is that Vodafone's DNS server is breaking some secure connections. I've seen references online to this breaking some https websites, it seems to be breaking POP3 mail too (probably also breaks IMAP, but I've not tried it). This seems to be something to do with Vodafone's content control
system.
The fix is simply to change your DNS to use a free public DNS server - I've changed our router settings to use a google DNS server, but there are many others. Probably a good idea to restart your router and reboot your computer after doing this, to make sure you pick up the change.
Hope this helps someone. Also hope Vodafone fix it.....
