The problem is that the firewall is seeing a spike in pop3 connections and does not like them and when that happens it shuts down everything instead of just the people popping to frequently.

Without the firewall on, the load goes through the roof. We are still looking for a solution and are trying to keep thiings up as much as possible but it is a fine line between staying up and overloading the machine and being able to maintain our terminal sessions while we try to diagnose the problem.