> From: Dave Powell [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> 
> Anybody else using the it?  Maybe you can help me.
> 
> worked fine until two weeks ago. [...]
> I know that the difference in the last two weeks has been 
> that our ISP has been having problems.  They have admitted to 
> it and blame it on being swamped by virus emails. [...]
> PCs sending emails [...] fail with messages about the connection 
> having been unexpectedly disconnected by the remote server.

I'm having that same problem at home as well -- exactly as you describe.  I did some checking with a network sniffer and I found that at the end of sending a message, one side [or the other] is sending an SMTP "RSET" command, which is resulting in the ISP's server dropping the connection at the same time as my client is issuing an "exit" command.  The connection drops [usually within 50ms] before my client finishes sending the "exit" command, so my e-mail client thinks "it didn't go" and requeues the item.  [yeah, "dumb, I know..."]

> Anybody know a way to make SBC behave better?  Anybody know a 
> good ISP that NEVER goes flaky the way SBC did?

oh, well that explains it -- my ISP is SBC also :(

HOWEVER...

poking around on their internal "news" server [prodigy/yahoo/sbc."support".email or some such] I found (repeated) references to a server called smtpauth.flash.net.  You have to set your client to do a "proper" logon, using your complete "username@sbc-subsidiary" as your user ID, but so far I haven't had an unexpected drop for the last three days.

I don't know if "mail" or "sendmail" can be configured in this way, but it's worth a shot.

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