> Do you see any packet loss when simply pinging that host?  Theoretically, it  
> could also be a congestion problem along the way and someone is just dropping  
> the frags.

Any? ;-)  Well, I can ping my ISP without any packet loss, but going to
other ISP's networks or outside Finland always causes packet loss.  I
guess now is one of the net "rush hours", and ping says this:

--- mail1.microsoft.com ping statistics ---
352 packets transmitted, 250 packets received, 28% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 572.705/930.239/1464.023 ms

So the packet loss is relatively high.  However, when I set MTU to 296, I
can _never_ (and that's _never_) get any e-mail through to m$ - even though
sendmail keeps trying for several days.  Even though I tried to e-mail
several times during several months.  Now that MTU is 576, all messages
get through pretty fast (even ones of several kilobytes).

  -jm

-- 

                     ---> http://www.jmp.fi/~jmarin/ <---