Kent L said:
I just set up Outlook 2003. Using the wizard, I set up my .msn pay
account
into outlook. I am able to send messages, but am not receiving my
messages.
I have used the F9 command, hit the send/receive button, and set up my
system
to go out every 10 minutes and look for messages. I am receiving the
error
message "inbox synchronization error (0x800CCCFO) The Service is
currently
unavailable. Try again later. The server responded 'service
unavailable.'
What am I missing?
You are missing the patience to wait to poll later to see if their
server comes back up. How long did you wait between errors? There is
no such thing as a 100% service. Despite providing load-balancing with
a farm of hosts distributed over multiple regions with UPS power and
whatnot, it is still possible a service will go down, especially should
they choose to perform some maintenance that requires the service go
offline or shutdown. Since you are talking about Microsoft's e-mail
service, you may have to wait several hours before it comes back up. I
have seen it take 4 days before it was available again. Since you are
paying for their e-mail service, contact them to report the outage. The
error message pretty much tells it all: service unavailable. You'll
have to wait until it is available again, whenever that happens. I just
tried and was able to successfully login to Hotmail. Since it's been a
over an hour since you tried, try again now.
I could be wrong, but I thought Microsoft (MSN) still relied on its
Hotmail service to provide e-mail service. The only e-mail link on the
http://www.msn.com web page goes to Hotmail. With Hotmail, learn to
expect unannounced outages. Periodically Hotmail will encounter lots of
problems and be down and it can be many hours before it is available
again. It seems to go in spurts. The outages are never announced
(because I'm not sure they do more planning regarding the outage more
than an hour out from the outage). Hotmail is not a reliable e-mail
service. Yahoo Mail is a tad better but also not a reliable e-mail
provider. Fact is, all e-mail providers have outages, but Hotmail is
worse than a normal POP3/SMTP/IMAP provider (but is not the worst). If
you are using e-mail for business, do NOT use Hotmail as it is too
unreliable a service. If for personal use, and although you paid for
MSN, you might want to look elsewhere for a more reliable e-mail service
and one that has more features. I had Hotmail (still do but its
dormant) but went to Yahoo Mail (even the freebie accounts have better
service than paid Hotmail accounts). With the paid Yahoo Mail account,
you get POP3/SMTP access usable by any e-mail client (rather than get
stuck with Hotmail's WebDAV access which is only usable by Outlook
[Express]). Even the freebie Yahoo Mail accounts are more reliable than
Hotmail (but you need to use YahooPOPs for POP3/SMTP access because
those servers are not provided with the freebie accounts), but
YahooPOPs, a local HTTP-to-POP3 proxy, proved too unreliable (it goes
unresponsive too often) and even the author recommends not using it if
reliability is a concern, especially regarding business use.
Microsoft does NOT provide POP3/SMTP service for a paid MSN account or a
paid/free Hotmail account - because Microsoft uses Hotmail which
requires using HTTP protocol and the WebDAV scripting in their local
clients (Outlook and Outlook Express) to gain access to your mailbox.
If Hotmail proves too unreliable for you, find another e-mail service,
and preferrably one that includes access to POP3/IMAP and SMTP servers.
Webmail is handy when travelling and you don't have your own laptop but
sucks for features and message management and archiving. I've used
Hotmail. Down too often and often slow to respond. I've use Yahoo Mail
(freebie which means I had to use YahooPOPs (to gain emulated POP3/SMTP
access via proxy) but it was too unreliable. More reliable than
Hotmail, even for the freebie account, but not reliable enough. Like
Hotmail, Yahoo Mail then started adding the intervening security page
that requires you to enter a code shown in a graphic image to
authenticate your login, and YahooPOPs couldn't handle that. This
intervening security page doesn't show up often but it will interfere
with any application that uses screen scraping to navigate the site. I
tried gawab.com which provides free POP3/SMTP servers but they are
unreliable (they go down too often, and even their web site is sometimes
unavailable). So I went back to using a service that actually provides
POP3 and SMTP servers AND is more reliable. It depends on your
sensitivity to outages or having to recover from problems causing loss
of access.
