I wonder if anyone else here does this ?

I have a Linux box (RedHat 7.1) that I use for my email, dns and some web site stuff. I like to be able to read my home email when I'm at work and I also provide email accounts to some friends.

Because the email is being accessed remotely (and by non-techy friends with Win98 boxes) I have a few requirements:

- must be able to use Outlook Express as a client, because my friends are used to it and it is ever present (currently my friends' email gets forwarded to their ISP supplied POP3 mail box, but they want to change to using my server instead)
- must use IMAP, as I want to keep my mail on the server
- must use SSL because I don't want plain text passwords floating around
- should ideally use standard mbox files on the Linux box (I have a bunch of scripts that I would prefer not to have to rewrite, because I have to relearn perl every time I use it)

I have all of this setup and running. I am using the IMAPD that comes with RedHat, which I believe is the University of Washington one.

It all works brilliantly from my Win2k workstation on the local network, it is very fast even using SSL.

It doesn't work so well when I am connecting from work and I can't work out why.

What happens is when I am downloading new mail, the download keeps stalling and restarting the whole time. This means that just downloading a handful of messages over a couple of folder takes 5 minutes, instead of the 10 seconds it should take.

The only interesting thing that I see in the server logs is (with IPs and user names removed):

17:49:22 imaps alternative service init from xx.xx.xx.xx
17:49:22 Login user=andytest
17:49:23 Command stream end of file, while reading line user=andytest
17:49:53 imaps alternative service init from xx.xx.xx.xx
17:49:53 Login user=andytest
17:49:54 Command stream end of file, while reading line user=andytest

The server is sitting on my DSL line, on a real IP address (i.e. no NAT), behind a firewall that has the appropriate holes punched in it. My work machine is connected to the net via a NAT connection somewhere (it must be, as I my machine has a private IP address and everything works too well for transparent proxies to be involved).

I'd normally just turn on Ethereal and see what was happening, but I'm using SSL so I can't even do that.

Has anyone come across a problem like this before ?