Webbased pop3 email scripts failing

Hi, I am having trouble with a web based email script connecting to a pop3 server . I have used this script in the past and its worked fine. I have recently changed my webhost and I have the following problems : I can issue the fsockopen against the server and port (110) and get back what appears to be a valid pointer. When I try and read from the pointer using fgets I get eof condition immediately. i.e. no server greeting . I can manually telnet to port 110 and I can see the greeting from the server , so I know the pop server is responding OK. I have tried the set_socket_blocking($fp,-1) and then tried retrying 5000 times - still nothing returned from fgets. Normal email clients (Eudora, poco, even outlook express!) work fine against this pop3 server in case anyone was wondering! BTW when I try this script against my old pop3 account (I still have an old account there) it works perfectly - any ideas anyone? Can my new webhost be blocking requests from http on their pop3 server? Anything in the config php.ini file that would need to be changed? Although it works against other pop3 servers from this web page. I am using PHP4 4.0.1pl2 on Apache 1.3.9 Thanks Jamie > ************