I now believe my mail problem is derived from the following:
sometime in recent history my ISP set up a "spam" box where it was sending all my spam (which is massive in amount). I have a hazy memory of them telling me this and being excited because I could exclude the spam folder from what I was downloading. So my theory is that I haven't been receiving mail because I just noticed that I have over 11mb of messages (which is over my quota), all of which is in the spam box. Not that I know this for sure because my ISP still hasn't responded to me and I do find it odd that if my mailbox were full why it wasn't bouncing emails back, but I don't have the time or inclination to really care. Anyway, I'm deleting all the messages in my spam box and we'll see how it goes.-----
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