I find that about 90 percent of POP3-type email accounts will not work unless you use the coresponding ISP dialup/DSL/Cable/ISDN service. I am not sure who you use for your email but you may look into this. Most ISP's block outside email server access as a method to avoid spamming and mass emailing blocks that jam bandwith and access to other users. There are very few email accounts I know that allow it. What is even sadder is that sometimes it may work, and sometimes it will not. As a matter of fact, I know for sure that Earthlink has been slowly instituting this with their dialup and ISDN accounts. There is a way around this. You can set your SMTP server for outgoing email on your Earthlink/new ISP account. However, this is mainly an issue for outgoing email only.

How about a required secure connection? Check your account settings to be sure that you enable or disable this depending on your email carrier's requirements.

Did you try to ping their email server/s (POP3 and SMTP) I would try this to be sure you are able to communicate with their servers.

Are you able establish a connection speed of more than 24kbs? If not, have your phone company come out and reverse your polarities. For phone, it is not a requirement of what polarity is set in the wiring (much like a light bulb). But a modem is sensitive to this and cannot get the full speed unless this is changed. You should NOT be charged by the phone company for this fix. This may or may not affect your time out issue. If the POP3 server detect that it is taking too long download the file, it may be timing out. A faster connection will help.

You may want to go to another computer with a faster internet connection and clean out your account.

Disable Norton's email scanning. This can sometimes cause a problem. Of course, if you have this enabled, you may have a whole other batch of issues that I could discuss. However, try disabling the email scanning only.

Hope this gets you started. Feel free to post back