OL2000 and OL2002 not playing nice with POP3

[iat]

i support ~100 users, 95% of which are using OL2000 or
OL2002. the issue i run into is this:

at least once day, about a 1/2 dozen users are unable to
send/recv any emails. sometimes the recv will pull 1/4-
1/2 the messages on the server and then just die. OL
stops responding, end task, no email. rebooting,
reopening OL, all the same results.

the only fix i have been able to procure is nothing more
than a lame hack. by using OE to set up the user's
account, i can d/l the messages to OE and then import them
back into OL, after which the problem will reoccur in n
number of hours/days. now if this was happening only on
one mail server, i might point the finger at the server.
but no, it's the same behavior from 3 different servers.
and the users like myself who are not using OL or OE are
having no issues with this. this is an OL client related
issue.

i have tried the creation of new profiles, removing and
reinstalling the entire office suite and OL itself, and so
forth, all yielding the same results. the strange part is
that none of the users displaying this issue came from the
former EXCH 5.5 server, all are fresh Office installs
direct to POP3, no conversion performed.

another hack that works about 40% of the time is to change
the delivery path where the mail is going to in OL. by
creating a new .pst file and pointing the new mail to dump
to that, this sometimes allows for the email to be d/l,
then moved to the original inbox after the delivery path
is reverted to the original location.

if anyone else has a real fix for this, please add to this
bthread or let me know via email. thanks.

-ian-

 

[Greg Bailey]

We have had problems of this nature and they generally result when the
entity reading from the POP3
server encounters a badly formed message. For example, some junk mail with
unix style line breaks in
the text rather than <CR/LF>. Another example is junk mail with no white
space between headers and
message body.

Outlook 2000 of 9.0.0.2711 vintage has no such problems, but recent Outlook
2002 installations have
encountered messages that cause Outlook to think so long that the POP3
server will time out the
session (err msg from Outlook implies that it was Outlook that timed out the
connection but this
is false).

Furthermore various "antivirus" or "antijunkmail" software, such as
Norton's, which actually does
the talking to POP3 server and then passes mesages to Outlook via a POP3
server on localhost
have turned out to be sensitive to badly formed messages as well.

Straight Outlook 2000 ought to work fine. Outlook 2002 is as far as I know
problematic.
Don't know about Outlook 2003 because I've discovered it has severe problems
simply deciding
which messages to download and which to delete when talking to our POP3
server that does not
support UIDL and TOP. If Outlook 2000 is having trouble, see if one of the
antivirus programs
is in the way.

 

[iat]

Greg,

at this time the only av software installed is mcaffee
corporate version 7.0.0. this does not do the routing for
junk mail through the 'localhost' like NAV does. i ran
into that last year with our navce 7.x.

the unix style line breaks is a likely candidate for this
issue as you stated, as these servers are unix based.
i'll work with our mail server team to develop a
resolution, possibly forcing a conversion on the inbound
messages to plain text or modifying/stripping some
formatting.

thanks for the tip.

-ian-