A
Adam P
Suddenly, our Outlook and Outlook Express users (various versions,
Outlook 2000, Outlook 2003, under both Windows 2000 and Windows XP
with Windows Firewall disabled) get frequent disruptions in their
connections with errors like:
"A connection to the server could not be established. (servername) is
now in offline mode."
and
"Could not fetch new headers in the inbox for (servername). An
unknown error has occurred. Please save any existing work and restart
the program."
The 2nd of these can't be cleared easily and requires restart.
(People are obviously upset about having to do this.) The errors
sometimes happen when trying to send a message, or sometimes
immediately after trying to send.
Mail server is Redhat Enterprise Linux 3.0 with default IMAP server
imap-2002d, SSL, and sendmail-8.12.10.
Server has run without problems for nearly a year, gradually scaling
from 2 users up to currently ~100. Most use Outlook or Outlook
Express, others use Netscape, a webmail interface (Usermin), Eudora,
Pine, or Thunderbird. Only Outlook (and OE) users have this problem.
Other network connections to the server (and other servers) are fine
so we don't suspect any kind of firewall or network problems. The
server has plenty of free memory available, though we often see
multiple IMAP connections from the Outlook clients and have no way to
minimize this.
(We'd like to keep cached/open connections to 1 to avoid possible
timeout issues with the client/server not agreeing on closing the
connection at the same time. I know Microsoft tests against U
Washington IMAP, which is standard for Redhat Enterprise Linux, but
the U Washington IMAP authors claim numerous unfixed IMAP bugs in
Outlook and Outlook Express.)
We've tried to make Outlook save/display connection logs but can no
longer find this functionality. We checked the System Event logs and
couldn't find anything related.
-Adam
Outlook 2000, Outlook 2003, under both Windows 2000 and Windows XP
with Windows Firewall disabled) get frequent disruptions in their
connections with errors like:
"A connection to the server could not be established. (servername) is
now in offline mode."
and
"Could not fetch new headers in the inbox for (servername). An
unknown error has occurred. Please save any existing work and restart
the program."
The 2nd of these can't be cleared easily and requires restart.
(People are obviously upset about having to do this.) The errors
sometimes happen when trying to send a message, or sometimes
immediately after trying to send.
Mail server is Redhat Enterprise Linux 3.0 with default IMAP server
imap-2002d, SSL, and sendmail-8.12.10.
Server has run without problems for nearly a year, gradually scaling
from 2 users up to currently ~100. Most use Outlook or Outlook
Express, others use Netscape, a webmail interface (Usermin), Eudora,
Pine, or Thunderbird. Only Outlook (and OE) users have this problem.
Other network connections to the server (and other servers) are fine
so we don't suspect any kind of firewall or network problems. The
server has plenty of free memory available, though we often see
multiple IMAP connections from the Outlook clients and have no way to
minimize this.
(We'd like to keep cached/open connections to 1 to avoid possible
timeout issues with the client/server not agreeing on closing the
connection at the same time. I know Microsoft tests against U
Washington IMAP, which is standard for Redhat Enterprise Linux, but
the U Washington IMAP authors claim numerous unfixed IMAP bugs in
Outlook and Outlook Express.)
We've tried to make Outlook save/display connection logs but can no
longer find this functionality. We checked the System Event logs and
couldn't find anything related.
-Adam