My cable was out and now my OUtlook Express won't work

[Antonia]

My cable line that is buried in the yard was severed (by my DH with a very large digger). We were without the internet for several days until the cable company fixed it. Now our tv's are coming in great and our MOXI box works great. The internet was very slow, but seems better, but my Outlook Express takes forever to send and receive messages. It always times out before messages get through. This is so frustrating. I have done every thing I know to do. The cable company did check my connection speed and I am getting a good signal and speed over the cable. I have run a virus scan and a spyware scan. Nothing shows up.I have checked my pop and smtp settings and everything looks okay to me.
Does anyone have any other suggestions? I thought this may have happened to some of you before.

 

[HonestAbe]

Try to ping the POP and SMTP servers first just to make sure you can hit em. You can also increase the time out under the control panel - mail - find the profile you use in OE and dig around a little and you should be able to find the timeout.

Another thing to try is from a command line do a continuous ping to someplace like sony.com. To do that, go Start, Run, type "cmd" or "command", hit enter, then type "ping -t www.sony.com" See if there are any timeouts. With a big site like Sony there shouldnt be. Ping times can range anywhere up to about 80ms but consistently getting over 80 would be a serious sign of trouble

If your internet is still slow, you need to let them know. Even though the cable break is "fixed" the signal being sent your TV is not nearly as fragile as a data packet. I accidently partially severed the cable going into my neighbors yard and he lost internet but his tv still worked. They should have attached a signal analyzer to your cable connection after it was restored to make sure power levels and signal attenutation were within reason.

 

[Antonia]

Thanks. I'll try some of your suggestions. After reading your post I really think they should have just ran a new cable because this one was severed completely and they just spliced it.

 

[Antonia]

Thanks. I'll try some of your suggestions. After reading your post I really think they should have just ran a new cable because this one was severed completely and they just spliced it.

 

[Pop Daddy]

have you tried the hitting it with a bat method

 

[Antonia]

I have seriously considered it.

 

[Lorix2]

when my service is lagging or just won't function properly, I unplug the cable from the modem and from my wireless router and wait 30 seconds and plug back in and wait til the modem shows activity and start everything up and it usually corrects the problem. That's what the cable company told me to do. "power cycling" it's called.