E-mail problem, again

In My Humble Opinion
1

Seems to happen ever couple years, that something funky comes up with my e-mail. This time, I’m really stuck.

I use a Mac with MS Office Outlook (but it’s not Outlook as you’ll see, below). My mail comes through Verizon (via yahoo).

A week ago, Outlook acted as if it was downloading every email I had every gotten since I bought my Mac. It was downloading over 10,000 emails (all of which I already received).

This went on for hours, until it got to about 750 emails left, and then it just quit. Suddenly I get an error: [SYS/TEMP] problem retrieving message. Now, I can send e-mail, but cannot receive it in Outlook. The weird thing is that I can’t see any of these re-loaded e-mails if I sort my inbox by date received, but if I sort them by “sender”, I can see them all.

I spent an hour on the tech support line with Verizon (my ISP for mail) and they were unable to resolve, then passed me off to Microsoft and they couldn’t do anything either.

In frustration, I figured I’d just use the Mac Mail application, but I get the same problem. I can send mail, but not retrieve mail.

I’ve had to access my mail on the web, which is a Royal PITA as it’s so slow and not linked to any of my previous organization efforts in Outlook.

So, I’m wondering… is it possible that there was some mail message that caused Outlook to try and “synchronize” my Outlook inbox with the mail on the server, and then it hit some mail that hung it up. Like I said, it stopped downloading those ~10,000 messages at about message number 750. And the error message says it’s having trouble retrieving “message”, not “messages”.

I’ve tried deleting and re-interring all my mailbox settings. I’ve tried deleting a bunch of those “new” e-mails that were downloaded (they all have a receive date of Feb 22). Nothing seems to work. I also deleted a bunch of older message in my inbox, just in case it might be getting too full, but no go.

Any ideas of what might be going on? This really sucks.

2

A [SYS/TEMP] error stands for “system temporarily down” and means that you are unable to log in to the outgoing email server. If you also can’t get it in MacMail, either both have the exact same configuration error, or you there’s something keeping your computer from contacting the server entirely.

You mention both Verizon and Yahoo! as your email provider. Does your email address end in verizon.net (or similar)? If not, then Verizon is not who you need to get support from. You need to get support from Yahoo if you are actually using Yahoo Mail.

Either way, you need to see if you can access your email another way. Both Verizon and Yahoo provide webmail services. So use your web browser and see if you can still get into your account. Go to Verizon Webmail if your email address has something to do with Verizon, or go to Yahoo! Mail otherwise. Or, heck, try them both. Use your username and password and make sure they both work.

If it doesn’t work, that’s your problem. You likely will need to use the password reset feature which should be listed as “forgot your password” on either site. Use that, reset your password, and change your Outlook settings to match.

If that does work, you’ll need to make sure your settings are correct. For Verizon email, use pop.verizon.net for your server and 995 for the port number. For Yahoo, use pop.mail.yahoo.com and port 995. Make sure to use your entire email address for your username and make sure to type your password exactly the same way as you did in the webmail.

If that still doesn’t work, I’m not sure what to tell you. I assume they’ve already told you to try restarting your computer and your modems. And if you had TimeCapsule or another way to roll your computer back to a time before the problem, I’m sure you would have tried it.

3

For what it’s worth, I had similar happen to my Yahoo/AT&T mail via my iPhone within the last week. Fortunately I “only” had about 200-some E-mails to download. :smack:

4

You know, it just dawned on me: maybe you hit a maximum number of downloaded messages, and so your mail server has blocked you temporarily. You did say this has happened before. Did it just clear up one day?

To prevent this sort of thing in the future, I’d suggest deleting the messages from the webmail interface, and then finding the option that will delete the mails on the server when you download them. Or, at least, periodically use the webmail interface and delete them there. Make it where you don’t have so many email messages to download whenever the server messes up like that.