No, I didn't miss it. If you read my posting you'll see that I mention it more than once and that the MD of Skymarket actually later sent out a message of apology to all Skymarket ADSL users (which I of course got). And actually about a week before that there was also a significant interruption to the service when a crucial BT node somewhere in the Midlands, I seem to recall, broke down. It affected lots of ISPs across the country, including Skymarket, and was reported on TBB's News section. So, not Skymarket's fault on that occasion.

I might add that, over the years that I've been with Skymarket, their service up-times have been excellent. This recent blip is not, I hope, the start of a downward trend.

Skymarket's pricings stem from their concentration on providing services to commerce. They've never aimed to be up there with the big boys like TalkTalk, Virgin, Sky and BT, as their target customers are not really joe public. Whilst their fees for ADSL Broadband are comparatively high, I've always found their tech support to be responsive and helpful, and that counts for a lot in my book. They don't employ people who are at the end of a phone in India or who simply read off scripts as solutions. All that inhouse service, however, has to be paid for in some way or other. Over the last year or so I've tried to persuade Skymarket to increase its monthly allowances (now fairly mean, by most people's standards) and to also move toward FTTC, but they've shifted very little on that. I may well switch to a different ISP in due course.

Anyway, this is a digression and is not getting the baby's nappies washed. I'm still no nearer finding a cause for the e-mail havoc and non-access I've been experiencing.

Edited by deleted (Wed 25-Apr-12 00:01:19)

b4dger, Saffron and XRay,

I think I may have finally found the reason - well, certainly ONE reason - why my e-mailing and my Internet access generally has been malfunctioning. I think it is probably down to a configuration mistake made entirely by me and concerns a server setting in the client account. Errh, doh! I've contacted my ISP to double-check with them.

Will be back here later to explain.

I look forward to your explanation.

The only "server setting in the client account" I can imagine is a email server setting in your email client, which would have no effect on your ability to browse or connect to the Net in general, but would certainly affect any emailing.

Yup, you guessed right, XRay. The setting was "My server requires authentication". Despite me having looked over several times this week all the settings in my client account, I'd not noticed that that one was not checked.

However, this has turned out to be a false positive, as my ISP has responded that, for smtp e-mail, the checking (ticking) of that setting is only optional. It's not actually required to be checked. Also, of course, Web access via browsing wouldn't also be affected by that.

So, as you were. I'm still no nearer to finding the cause.

So null effect! In fact you never need "My outgoing server requires authentication". when using the default port-25 SMTP Server of your own ISP. It knows who you are by the mere fact that you connected to them for the Internet.

The earlier email error you reported concerned failure to connect to their POP3 server, not SMTP, had nowt to do with this and was certainly due to it being down as covered by their admittance of being blighted by email issues .

Don't get confused with my namings. Mostly, I've been referring to my e-mail connection generically as a "POP connection", and doing so merely to distinguish it from webmail. I do realise that outward messages from me go via an smtp server, whereas inward ones come in via a pop server.

The latest explanation coming from my ISP is that two different things are happening with me - corruption of e-mails and loss of access to the Internet. Well, I agree with that. However, they've come up with a theory, which they say they've tried out and confirmed, concerning the corrupted, multiple e-mails. This is what they contend:

They say that if the 'break apart messages longer than x KB' setting in OE is checked, a single e-mail message will get split up into a collection of separate e-mails and will therefore get delivered as separate e-mails. The setting in OE is found in the Properties of the POP3 e-mail account, in the Advanced tab. They suggest that this is why any attachment in the message will be corrupted!

Quite apart from me not using that setting, my understanding of that setting is that it merely segments packets of a message during initial launch into the Internet but that the packets are reassembled at the receiving end. This is a hangover from the days of dial-up, when speeds were far slower and there were more bottlenecks on the Internet requiring messages to be split up and sent by different routes. No multiple e-mails were produced from the sender;s single e-mail, as far as I'm aware. The implication of their explanation is that the recipient would need to open several contsituent e-mails in order to read a single, full message. Really? How would you ever send someone a sizeable attachment, using that setting?!

As you don't have that setting ticked, this is not a solution..

If you had used it the msgs would have been auto reassembled at recipient. It's mainly used for mail servers that place limits on emails, but the mail client on PC or Web should reassemble them.

Still leaves unexplained loss of access to the Internet.

Yes, you agree with me on all points, XRay.

In fact, I have this morning tested out that "break apart messages ... " setting and sent myself some long e-mail test-messages, first without an attachment included and then with an attachment included. In both cases, I only ever got back one complete message, and in both there was also no corruption. It'd simply be daft for that setting to work in any other way, wouldn't it?

Am still no nearer determining why I've from time to time received multiple copies of corrupted e-mails and why randomly I lose all access to the Internet, even though my router never drops the line.

I'd have thought there was a clue in the e-mail client's error message, in that it's telling me it's a 0x800CCC0D error and, as you know, it's saying that it can't find the e-mail server. I've googled for that error code but all I've turned up are vague explanations. Surely, Microsoft should have at some stage published a precise definition of that particular error code? Clearly, what I need to know is whether the inaccessibility is happening somewhere at my end of things or instead at some server much further beyond the exchange.

In fact, my ISP has turned out to be correct about that "break apart ..." issue, as when they prompted me to look in my Deleted Folder in my e-mail client, I found appended multiple copies of my test messages, albeit that none of them contained any body text. All they each contained was a .dat attachment. Thus, whilst the recipient does get a full message, with or without attachment, other copies of the message are also received but bypass the Inbox and are dumped into the Deleted Items folder.