wrote in message ...
Suddenly, since 2 days, I am unable to send or receive to Cox's news
servers.

I am a Cox hi speed Internet subscriber and have several subscribed
newsgroups on news.east.cox.net. Without my having changed anything on my
side I am suddenly unable to contact any of them. Cox "support" insists
there are no reported problems on their news servers.

- Internet access works fine.
- Email to and back from my cox mailbox works fine.
- Other newsgroups (like this one) work fine.


The error message is
"Outlook Express could not post your message.
Account: 'news.east.cox.net'. Server: 'news.east.cox.net'. Protocol: NNTP,
server
Response:

'502 Maximum number of connections reached. (newsfe 12.iad) (Tomado
v1.2.6.556-2). Port: 119, Secure(SSL): No. Server error: 502, Error Number
0x800CCCAO"

1) Any suggestions?


Try a different news reader. OE doesn't issue an NNTP Quit command
and creates more connections than it really needs to so the server's
message may be quite valid, depending on what you are doing and
what the server's idle timeout policy and connection limit is.

What you could try is waiting a few minutes and retesting
with a telnet session to simulate that logon. E.g. in a cmd window
enter:

telnet
then
o news.east.cox.net 119

Wait for the prompt from the server. Then, since login seems
to be required:

AUTHINFO USER {your user name}

and

AUTHINFO PASS {your user name's password}

If you get logged in without the error message then
you should terminate that simulation with

QUIT

You should really terminate the session that way in any case
but I suspect your session would be terminated after the error message.


You could also activate troubleshooting logging for news but OE doesn't
record all its interactions with the server there. It's best to do a full TCP
packet trace and format the NNTP traffic. E.g. I use netcap for the
capture and Ethereal (aka WireShark) for the formatting.

Otherwise ask the server operator how long the idle timeout is
and after you get the message, wait at least that long before
retrying with OE.


2) Any free news servers I can use in the meanwhile?


For which newsgroups? All the microsoft newsgroups are available
on a free news server: msnews.microsoft.com which does not
require authentication.



Thanks.

Jeff



Good luck

Robert Aldwinckle
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