Why am I being told, when accessing mail, that the POP lock is
busy?
This happens when the following scenario occurs: Someone sends you a very big mail file. You go to check your email, and it starts downloading the huge file. Because it takes a long time for the file to download and nothing seems to be happening, it looks to you like the connection to the mail server is hung or stuck, so you quit out of your email program or disconnect from the internet. The mail server was still in the middle of transfering the email to your computer, and it never receives the QUIT command from the email software and so it thinks your session is still active. If you try to access mail again right away, before the server times out, the server responds with the above error. One solution is simply to wait for all your emails to download. If you do get the POP lock error, no need to worry; "POP locks" normally expire by themselves after 10 to 15 mintutes.
But since waiting for the lock to go away, to say nothing of downloading a very large email, can take a while, we have a way for you to avoid to this problem. You can view, identify and delete problem emails
by going to our Web Mail page. This lets you easily look at the emails that are on the server, without needing to go through downloading them to your computer.
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