POP3 login delay issue

[ndelong]

I've got a toaster server that has been running for about a year or so without any major incidents. My toaster is version 4.04 on FreeBSD 5.3. The server is a single system and the toster configs have as much of the default options as possible (save for hostnames, etc.)

Yesterday, my Nagios system began firing off alerts that say "Connection timed out after 10 seconds" for the pop3 service on the toaster.

I did a simple check in Outlook and indeed - it takes about 40 seconds to log in via pop3. I began to troubleshoot the issue further, and also found that my pop3 service hasn't been logging anything since October 20th. I've been troubleshooting the issue for a while now and have checked permissions on all logging directories/files... I've run the toaster-watcher.pl script manually to check for issues (none seen). I've also run the manual test switch in the toaster_setup.pl script - and although it's delayed, the pop3 service checks out ok. The system load is normal (almost always 99% idle), netstat is normal... Everything *appears* normal (except the lack of pop3 logs).

I've searched through the forums here and found some leads - someone had an arpa issue that caused their pop3 service to delay 2 minutes. I checked (r)DNS for the server and it's ability to do lookups and all seems fine.

So I guess I have 2 questions:

1) What direction should I go to verify proper operation of pop3 logging?

2) Any ideas on the pop3 login delay?

I will gladly provide more information should anyone like to take me up on my questions.

Shamless buttering - Matt, I've been following your work for years & appreciate all that you've taught us along the way! Cheers to Matt!

Regards,

Nate D.