Entourage No Longer able to Receive Mail from Hotmail Act

[frankmur]

Running Powerbook G4, Mac OS X v 10.4.6, MS Entourage 2004 v 11.2.3

Currently still able to receive mail into Entourage from my Yahoo, Mac
and Earthlink accounts with no problems. However, over the last few
weeks my problems with receiving mail from my Hotmail account is
continuing to get worse. At this point I can not receive mail from my
Hotmail act into Entourage.


Current Problem and Attempts to Fix:

When I use the "Send & Receive" command, Entourage will go out to the
Hotmail account shows the correct number of mail messages to download
and appears like it will begin to download the messages but then just
does nothing for a few moments and then the following error message
pops up:

Error Message: "Connection to the sever has been dropped", "could not
retrieve mail", "Error - 3253"

Up to a few weeks ago everything was fine, then I began to get error
messages about being unable to delete some mail messages in hotmail
once they were received into entourage. In the last few days as I
mentioned have been unable to receive messages at all from my Hotmail
account.

Deleted the my Hotmail Account form the "Tools" drop-down menu and
added it back in with no improvement. During the process of adding the
Hotmail Account back used the verify account process step and this
confirmed everything was setup correctly.

In every other way my computer is running normally, checked/verified
Keychain, Disk Permissions, Verify Disk and Preference Files all
checked okay.

Confirmed there are messages in my Hotmail act when I log in directly
through the web.

Recent software changes: OS upgrade to 10.4.6 from 10.4.5, OS Security
Update 2006-002, MS Messenger 5.1.1, MS Office 2004 11.2.3.

Hotmail is my main email act for work and personal use and not having
the ability to receive these messages into Entourage is causing a real
problem. Need to get this fixed quickly any help would be appreciated.


Thank you

 

[frankmur]

Wanted to add that I also verified the Entourage Database and that
checked out okay as well.

 

[Diane Ross]

When I use the "Send & Receive" command, Entourage will go out to the
Hotmail account shows the correct number of mail messages to download
and appears like it will begin to download the messages but then just
does nothing for a few moments and then the following error message
pops up:

It could be a bad message that is causing the problem. Use your web browser
to view your mail. It's most likely one of the oldest messages you have. Try
moving these older messages to a temporary folder then test downloading in
Entourage. You might need to move all messages out and test small batches to
find the offending email.

Once you find the bad message you can delete it in your web browser.

If you are still having problems, you might want to use tcpflow to view the
traffic between Entourage and the hotmail server to see what is causing the
problem.

Download the Mac OS X version here:

http://www2.entropy.ch/download/tcpflow-0.20.dmg.gz

When you install, you do not see an actual application.

To run the test, quit all other apps that might be connecting to the
internet like your browser, ftp client.

Copy/paste in this command in the Terminal:

sudo /usr/local/bin/tcpflow -i en0 -c

Now try to send the email and watch the traffic in the window of the
Terminal. You should see what is failing.

 

[frankmur]

Went back and checked Hotmail directly on the Web and sure enough
several messages in my Hotmail Inbox had a red question mark on some
unread mail message. Forwarded the mail messages with the red question
mark to another email account and deleted them out of Hotmail.

Tried the Send/Receive command again in Entourage and everything is
working fine - received the forwarded messages from my other email
account and the balance of messages in my Hotmail all came into my
Entourage Inbox.

This is the first time I have noticed the red question marks on certain
unread email messages in Hotmail, is this something new or did I just
not notice it before. The question marks appeared on non-spam email
from different companies - Netflix, etc.

Thanks for the help.