No emails

[bigglesuk]

Since the weekend i have had intermitent problems with my emails. Sometimes i can get them and other times i cant connect to the mail server,my wife is having the same problem.
I have spoken to tech support twice and they have told me it is a problem with outlook or my firewall(xp one)The problem with that is that i still cant connect with firewall off and i can still get access to my hotmail via outlook.
I have only had this problem since there was a major outage in my area(surrey)
I also installed thunderbird and had the same problems!!
Any help would be greatly apreciated.

[cookster]

You got NTL Netguard installed? If so, turn it off and try to download e-mails. Once you've downloaded the e-mails switch Netguard back on.

For some reason if theres an e-mail it don't like in the download batch it just times out!

[bigglesuk]

I have not got netguard on my pc. I can download hotmail to outlook express and i can now get googlemail to outlook express as well.
I can only get ntl emails intermittently ie check for them and i get them,check an hour later and i cant!
Tech support are less than useless and to be honest if i cant get this sorted soon i think i will delete my ntl accounts and use good old hotmail and the google account.
Anybody got any ideas where i go from here???