All emails with attachments taking forever to download
Redfran
Contributor - Level 1

Hello,

I've been using verizon.net email with Entourage for Mac for over 11 years. Suddenly, about a month ago, any email with an attachement (even if it's less than 1mb) is hanging up Entourage -- taking anywhere from 2 to 15 minutes to download. And god help me if there are multiple emails with attachments. Valium anyone?  Emails without attachments are coming through fine. Very frustrating because I use this email for work and receive attachments quite frequently.

I'm having this same problem on both of my macs. One is running Lion, the other Snow Leopard. I haven't made any changes to Entouage recently, so I'm assuming it's a Verizon server issue? 

Has anyone else encountered this problem? I'm using port 995 for receiving emails. Is that still correct?

Any help would be really appreciated.

Thanks all.

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Re: All emails with attachments taking forever to download
Redfran
Contributor - Level 1

Me again. 

This issue hasn't resolved itself. All of my emails with attachments take a realllly long time to download. Today it took over 4 minutes to download a 1.8 mb PDF. This can't be the new normal could it? 

I'm just trying to find out where the problem lies. I'm assuming it's with the Verizon servers since I'm having the same trouble on both of my Macs (running different operating systems). Or could it be an Entourage problem (which I've been using for years as my email client with no issues). Port settings? I just don't know what might all of a sudden cause emails with attachments (even small attachments) to download at a snail's pace. It's very frustrating.

Does anyone have any insight or opinions? I'd really appreciate it. 

Thank you.

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Re: All emails with attachments taking forever to download
tns
Master - Level 2

Depending on your speed and the actual encoding used (some encoding drastically increasing the file size) it may be normal and then it may not be.  Remember that MB is roughly 8 time larger then Mb.  One of the common encodes essentailly doubles the file size by representing the bytes as hex ascii charaters ie. a byte represented as two ascii characters each or taking two bytes.   Not using ascii, this can be doubled again..

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Re: All emails with attachments taking forever to download
Redfran
Contributor - Level 1

Thanks tns. I appreciate your response. My speed shouldn't be an issue since I'm getting 35/35 with Fios (well that's what I'm paying for -- the numbers are a bit slower in real life!). 

I understand, in theory, what you're saying about the encoding of attachments. It makes sense on a general level. I guess I'm wondering why, all of a sudden, this would be an issue. Everything was fine for years. Could the encoding have changed recently?

Where does the actually encoding take place? At the Verizon servers? At the computer level? Is this something I can check?

Thanks again.

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Re: All emails with attachments taking forever to download
tns
Master - Level 2

At 35/35 the download speeds you mentioned would sound a bit to slow.

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Re: All emails with attachments taking forever to download
scottydog
Enthusiast - Level 3

It's not you, your software, encoding or computer.  The real problem is the email servers. No one with Verizon will admit they dont have enough hardware to support all their customers.

I had been in touch with customer support from east to west coast's and very few supervisors are aware of this. One recent week ago, a high level support person said the servers are too few and they are designing and planing to upgrade them but without any complete date. So, the reply was, maybe a few months or a year.

For the time being, they are throttling email speeds to 1.5 down/1.5 up on webmail at all times and via email client software (outlook etc) it will vary depending on time of day. Faster at night, slower in daytime or business hours.

I believe this is decieving to all customers as I'm sure no one is getting any discount on their Fios Internet billing. I have asked for credits however, trouble tickets need to be generated first to make it easy for billing to verify there is a tech issue filed/pending on your account.

All I can say is, send written letters to the CEO of Verizon, Lowell C. McAdam:

http://about.verizon.com/index.php/about/leadership-team/mcadam

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Re: All emails with attachments taking forever to download
Redfran
Contributor - Level 1

Well, I recently received Verizon's email about changing the current settings for my email account. So I changed them exactly as requested: pop.verizon using port 995 and smtp.verizon using port 465 (both with SSL). 

And now I have a slow down issue sending AND receiving emails with attachments. Sending an email with a 3 MB attachment took over a minute. Sending one under 1 MB (300 kb) took 22 seconds. This is crazy. Has anyone else had any major slowdowns with sending and receiving attachements after changing the settings?

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