Outlook 2003 receive fails on some emails

D

Duncan Grant

I am running Outlook 2003 SP3 under Windows XP and use it for Pop3 emails from my web mail service which is BT Internet (i.e. Yahoo). There are three email accounts (one primary and two secondary) accessed in this way.

For the last couple of weeks I have had a problem where emails on one or more of the accounts fail to download but mostly at least one account is still working. What seems to happen is that there is a problem with a particular email which causes the download to hang. This is manifested in one of two ways, either (a) you can see the counter go to that email and a specific number of KB and then stop or (b) the download runs incredibly slowly, clocking up just 20 or 30 bytes at a time until it stops altogether. If you repeat the send/receive, it stops at exactly the same point. Eventually it fails with a timeout error. EG:

Task 'Duncan Grant (Home) - Receiving' reported error (0x8004210A) : 'The operation timed out waiting for a response from the receiving (POP) server. If you continue to receive this message, contact your server administrator or Internet service provider (ISP).'

This is what I have tried to do to solve the problem so far (in addition to several hours on the phone to the ISP).

• Run test account settings – all works OK
• Run Outlook Express and try to access the same accounts – same problem
• Disable Norton scanning of incoming email. No effect.
• Delete the email account from Outlook accounts and reinstate. No effect.
• Identify the specific email that appears to be causing the problem and remove it from the webmail inbox. This has solved the specific instance of the problem but it soon recurs when another email causes the same issue. There does not seem to be any reason why the email concerned should cause a problem (typically it might be one of many from a colleague or from my bank or even one that has been received OK previously, just text, no attachments, not spam).
• Extend timeout setting in Outlook – no effect except it takes longer to fail.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks

Duncan
 

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