Bad connection to email server

We have been with talktalk since March 2005, and have never had any problems - until the last week.

We connect via a Buffalo router, and we use Firefox and Thunderbird

No problem at all web browsing, however now we have received intermittent emails for a week, and for the last 2 days we have been unable to send/receive any. Thunderbird returns a message "Connection to server mail.talktalk.net timed out" However pinging the servers (62.24.128.134/139) seems to work ok.

Tried to connect via "mytalktalk.co.uk, but because we haven't had to use it for over 2 years we forgot password. Now we are in the position of they have sent a reply to our email account, but we can't get to the email!!!

HELP!!!!

Edited by RogerE (Tue 04-Mar-08 20:15:57)