Can receiving spam cause Outlook 2003 to hang?

[Guest]

Hi,

On several ocations Outlook 2003 has stopped responding when downloading my
regular spam load in the morning (approx 100 spam, 5 mails). I then kill the
application, restart it and it hangs on the same message number again. I can
repeat it but not get past it. I then open my webmail instead, find the
message and delete it. When restarting Outlook everything works fine.

How can I prevent this from happening? Is this an Outlook bug? (I have the
latest updates from the Office site.)

/Anna

PS I have two saved copies of these spam messages on my computer if that
would help.

 

[BillR [MVP]]

Is antivirus email integration enabled?
I'd try to purge your mailbox by downloading all the emails in another
client such as Outlook Express. Outlook might just be stuck on one message.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for your reply, but it didn't quite answer my question. I'll clarify:
I know Outlook gets stuck on one message, and I use a webmail client to
remove that message. That is however not a very good solution since I have
been encountering this problem allmost daily lately. Can I get rid of the
problem in Outlook with some configuration or hotfix? Is this some known bug
with malformed email messages?

I'm not sure what you mean by "antivirus email integration". I do have
McAffee installed and set up to scan email.

 

[Brian Tillman]

On several ocations Outlook 2003 has stopped responding when
downloading my regular spam load in the morning (approx 100 spam, 5
mails). I then kill the application, restart it and it hangs on the
same message number again. I can repeat it but not get past it. I
then open my webmail instead, find the message and delete it. When
restarting Outlook everything works fine.

Not at all unusual. Try this:

Using REGEDIT, add the following DWORD key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\POP3SVC\Parameters\CheckPop3Tail

Set the value to 1. I have seen references to articles that indiate this
can ameliorate the occasion of Outlook hanging on ill-formed messages.

 

[Brian Tillman]

I'm not sure what you mean by "antivirus email integration". I do have
McAffee installed and set up to scan email.

This merely adds a complication to the mail process and offers you little in
benefit, provided you're also running McAfee's VirusScan on-access scanner.
Don't scan incoming mail if you want reliable client/server communications.