Windows Mail Microsoft Communities features problem.

[Alexander Suhovey]

Recently I found a workaround for some issues I've had with Windows Mail and
Microsoft newsgroups so I thought I'd post this information that hopefully
will be useful for somebody with same problems.

Ever since I've installed Vista on my home computer, I was using Windows
Mail as my e-mail and news reader and was quite happy with it (though I will
move to Outlook 2007 as soon as I get my copy of Office). However as time
passed, I started experiencing some glitches with Microsoft Communities
newsgroups.

Most annoying was filtering glitch. Normally, I'm using Ctrl+H to quickly
see if there are any new posts in conversations I've posted to and
occasionally it won't filter out conversations correctly anymore meaning it
would show not only "my" conversations but *all* recent newsgroup posts too.
That was driving me crazy. Also, "Refreshing metadata..." status would
occasionally stay in the status bar for extra long time.

And recently I've noticed that there's a constant network activity going on.
Quick check in Reliability and Performance Monitor revealed that WinMail.exe
is constantly accessing remote host with IP address 207.46.196.93, TCP port
80. When I've changed the focus to another newsgroup in Windows Mail, second
connection was immediately initiated by WinMail.exe to the same
IP/destination port with different source port. IP in question belongs to
Microsoft so I assumed it was legit. The only part of Windows Mail I could
think of that would require WinMail to connect over HTTP is Microsoft
Communities features like post ratings and what not.

Now it started to make sense since I don't delete any newsgroup posts and
there are tens of thousands of them across several newsgroups I'm watching.
I suppose updating metadata for such big number of post could take a lot of
time and bandwidth and probably also was the cause of those filtering
glitches.

Setting "Never use Community features that require Windows Live ID" in
Microsoft Communities folder options didn't help even after Windows Mail
restart so I ended up adding outbound rule to Windows Firewall that blocks
WinMail from accessing 207.46.196.93, 80/tcp.

Now Windows Mail works as good as initially. I guess Community features do
not work well with amount of newsgroup messages I have stored locally.

 

[Steve Cochran]

That's interesting information, but if you turned off the communities
feature and it still accesses that site, then it would seem to me that its
accessing that site for another reason than the communities feature.

If you block that with your firewall, and then turn on the communities
feature, does it work?

cheers,

steve

 

[Alexander Suhovey]

Steve,

Apparently, "Never use Community features that require Windows Live ID"
setting doesn't control *all* of Community features.

Here's more info on the subject. I've turned on NNTP logging in Windows Mail
and the log file
C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Mail\Microsoft
Communities.log confirmed that the problem is indeed with Community
features:

============================================
HTTP: 10:43:51 [db] Server 'cctextws.microsoft.com' current connection
state: Sending the request to the Communities service...
HTTP: 10:43:51 [db] Failed to send request: 12029.
HTTP: 10:43:51 [db] Connection to 'cctextws.microsoft.com' closed.
HTTP: 10:43:51 [db] Connection to 'cctextws.microsoft.com' closed.
HTTP: 10:43:51 [db] Connection to 'cctextws.microsoft.com' closed.
============================================

cctextws.microsoft.com resolves to... that's right, IP 207.46.196.93.
However, it has more than one IP assigned probably for load balancing. For
example, IP 207.46.248.208.

So if you have a firewall that can block traffic based on DNS names, using
cctextws.microsoft.com or cctextws.microsoft.com.akadns.net DNS names will
block Community features more reliably.


--
Alexander Suhovey

That's interesting information, but if you turned off the communities
feature and it still accesses that site, then it would seem to me that its
accessing that site for another reason than the communities feature.

If you block that with your firewall, and then turn on the communities
feature, does it work?

cheers,

steve