Problem receiving mail in Outlook

[#1]

I use Outlook as my POP client. This evening I went to check my email, received some new emails, but the send/receive dialog informed me it was retrieving 185 new emails ("Receiving list of messages from server..." in Outlook). A popup kept appearing telling me my POP3 server has not responded in 60 seconds (incoming.verizon.net) and would I like to wait for it to respond? I'd keep clicking "Wait", the task bar would get to maybe 85-90% and then it would say:

"Your server has unexpectedly terminated the connection. Possible causes for this include server problems, network problems, or a long period of inactivity. Account: 'Verizon email', Server: 'incoming.verizon.net', .... " etc.

I wasn't expecting to receive that many emails and I'm concerned that there could be a problem with my POP3 server. There is no way I'd receive over 180 emails in one day.

[#2]

Go to;  http://webmail.verizon.net/signin/

And visually check the messages in your inbox.

Then double-check the settings for incoming.verizon.net and outgoing.verizon.net  and verify that they are configured correctly.