I’ve got a PC set up in the office next door which (for reasons I have ranted about before) is a standalone machine, not connected to the LAN, acting as ‘the email machine’ - dialling up on one of the analogue channels(don’t ask, really) on an ISDN line to collect email from half a dozen different POP3 mailboxes.
It runs Outlook 2000 under Win98SE and I have the latest version of Spampal installed (but this is largely irrelevant, I think…)
Suddenly (starting yesterday), we are unable to download messages with large attachments; in the sen/receive status dialog, It is connecting to the server, then it reports ‘downloading message 1 of x’, but gives up before completing the download - I tried extending the timeout in the Account properties, and it doesn’t give up so quickly, but it still does give up.
Now this is strange because it was not always the case; up until yesterday, we had been receiving some very large messages (8MB or more sometimes, which is pretty big for dialup), but now it won’t download anything bigger than about 750K.
It wouldn’t appear to be the POP3 servers because it happens on more than one account (and they are hosted all over the place)
It wouldn’t appear to be SpamPal, because I tried disabling it and retrieving the mail directly; same problem.
It wouldn’t appear to be the connection because that is still connecting at 56K and does not drop when the problem occurs.
Any suggestions? - I thought the POP3 timeout only applied while it was waiting to establish a session, not once the session is underway.
Does this ring a bell. If not I`ll try to help later.
Somebody else (at the helpdesk of one of the ISPs) suggested corrupted messages and it is a possibility, but it seems unlikely as it has now happened for three or four large messages on more than one account…
Heres a little more
The port information is usually the default setting of 25 for the SMTP server and 110 for the POP3. If you require other ports to be specified, you are probably in a network environment and should consult with your IT department.
Server timeouts are the amount of time allowed to elapse before Outlook stops trying to contact the mail server if it receives no response. If your mail server is experiencing slow delivery, you may wish to increase the Server Timeout time. The default setting is one (1) minute.
Sending options allow you to break apart large messages into smaller messages. Some Internet service providers and e-mail software do not support this feature and you should use this carefully. The messages recombine when received, if the process is allowed to work correctly.
(from here )
Have you fiddled with the timeout settings for Outlook 2000? Is it set for the max (five minutes)?
The advanced tab is important. Always remember to increase the “server timeouts” to a maximum of five minutes. Outlook could still “timeout” if you try to download super large messages (or attachments) or excessive numbers of new e-mails.
We strongly discourage you from leaving a copy of messages on your ISP’s mail servers. This can cause three problems: (1) mail accounts usually only have 25 MB of space; (2) full mail directories cause make it take much longer to check your e-mails; and (3) Outlook may mistakenly report that there are no new messages if it sees old messages that have already been checked.
from here .
Any help so far?
No clues as to why it just started happening though.
Have you updated spampal yet?
One of the patches “Fixed a bug that was causing corruption of messages larger than about 5Mb.”