ssl problems

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

I recently updated from debian lenny to squeeze, and have found that
connecting to gmail's pop servers via ssl has become extremely dicey. I
have four email addresses, all of them gmail, and on any given mail
check three of them will tell me "POP SSL connexion failed". It can be
very hard to get all my email. My emacs/gnus versions and setup did not
change (still emacs 23.3.1 and gnus 5.13), all that changed was my linux
installation. I'm accessing gmail on port 995 with ":ssl t", and I have
"starttls-use-gnutls" set to true. My gnutls version is 2.8.6, which I
see isn't the latest version, but 2.10 isn't in the debian repos and
besides this was working smoothly under lenny, which presumably had the
same gnutls version.

Is there anything I can do to further debug this? I'm not an expert with
using gnutls-cli from the command line, but so far as I can tell it
connects fine (gnus only fails *most* of the time, anyway…). Is there a
way to get gnus to tell me *why* the POP SSL connection failed?

Thanks,
Eric