yeah its never worked reliable enough for me threadbare, I dont use the address for hardly anything but it is in my outlook send/receive group so when I click it to download mails, I know its broken when the box pops up with the error, also even when it works I noticed the ntl mail server is slow at responding, I have 5 pop3 accounts used in outlook and 4 of them are almost instant at resonding and the ntl one always lags behind. I have done numerous test's sending mail from my hotmail account to all of my pop3 email boxes and everytime the ntl one takes days to arrive and the others take mins if not seconds, I have had occurences where email arrives from my sister at 2am on a sunday morning, which when I tell you she sends them from work where she does 9-5 mon-fri you then know something is up
When sending email it quite often has taken well over a week to arrive even if its a simple 1kb text message, and strangely enough my attachments seem to always get stripped off.
As far as my connection goes its pretty much good, I dont get slow connections to any other email servers, or other internet services so I pretty much assume its ntl's email servers, and judging by the other respnses here and that massive thread on the old nthellworld site then I know its an ongoing problem especially as I know ntl are setting up a new email server to try and fix it.