I am trying to download emails to The Bat,

The following is what appears in the Connection Centre, but then is says it is deleting messages and it starts to delete messages, I have no idea what messages it is deleting either. But when it gets to deleting about 2700 or so messages, the Connection Centre just goes blank and then it starts over again an no emails have been deleted or downloaded. I have never had this problem before and am wondering if anyone has any ideas on what to do ?

receiving mail messages
Connecting to POP3 server  on port 110
connected to POP3 server
authenticated (plain)
3200 messages in the mailbox, 268 new