One bad message spoils the whole bunch

[Guest]

We are a small compnay and use Office 2003 and a hosted POP3 service for email.

We are now experiencing an odd situation where certain emails will cause
Outlook (fully patched) to become unable to download the entire Inbox. If I
go in to that account using webmail, I can hunt for and move the selected
message to a temp folder which then allows the remaining messages to be
received.

The messages only have one thing in common, an attachment. Sending servers
vary, sizes of attachments vary, etc. A significant example was Ralph, who
sent me a message with his .vcf attachment and without. While the message
with the .vcf attachment was there, Outlook would give the following error
message.

! Task 'mydomain.com - Receiving' reported error (0x800CCC0F) : 'The
connection to the server was interrupted. If this problem continues, contact
your server administrator or Internet service provider (ISP).'

If I take that one message out, mail flows smoothly. Also, Ralph was able to
send messages to us as late as 9:30 AM EST yesterday, but as of 12:00 noon,
was unable to.

MOST messages with attachments come through without a problem. This is less
than 1% of the total message throughput, but when they are there, the mailbox
is essentially blocked.

 

[Guest]

A quick followup. I did go to: http://support.microsoft.com/KB/813514

Our primary firewall is a PIX. We do utilize the standard XP firewall as
well.
The error is immediate, there is no delay. We turned off SAV Corporate
Edition to make certain that it wasn't the product interfering. No change.

The only item in this technote that points to what I am dealing with is #8,
a bad message. I remove the message and all works well without any other
changes.

So what is wrong with these messages?