it would seem that you do not have an imap daemon listening on the standard port or the port is being blocked do an ls -ax | grep imap to see what imap daemons are running you can also do a chkconfig --list | grep imap to see if xinetd is loading it or not > Maybe this is an IMAP issue? what you say below proved for the most part > I can't connect to the server throuogh another mail client or telnet either. again i would say that imap is not running make sure you start imapd (use chkconfig) and try again -munir