Outlook 2002 Sending and Receiving Error

[Carl]

I use Outlook 2002 to manage email in 5 seperate email
accounts -- 4 POP accounts and Hotmail. Recently (within
the last week), one of the POP accounts began giving me
the following error:

Task 'AT&T Global - Primary - Sending and Receiving'
reported error (0x800CCC0F) : 'The connection to the
server was interrupted. If this problem continues,
contact your server administrator or Internet service
provider (ISP). The server responded: ???'

Researching the Microsoft Knowledge Base led me to Article
329916 which discusses disabling any email antivirus
programs for this error message. The only program of this
sort that I run is with Zone Alarm Basic. Since both
Outlook 2002 and Zone Alarm have been working fine
together with NO error messages for many months up till
last week, I didn't think this was the problem. However,
I disabled the email protection in Zone Alarm Basic
anyway -- I am still receiving the error message from the
ONE email account, even with the email protection in Zone
Alarm disabled.

Since 2 of the 5 email accounts Outlook 2002 checks is
with the same email service (AT&T Business) and 1 of these
2 accounts is generating the error message, I am confused
as to where to look to eliminate the error. It doesn't
seem to be my email service provider (AT&T Business) since
only 1 of the 2 accounts is generating the error.

Any suggestions/solutions??

 

[Jeff Stephenson [MSFT]]

Outlook 2002 will always try to download from all your mail accounts
simultaneously. If you have two accounts on AT&T, that means that Outlook
will try to make two connections to the AT&T server to download mail. It
may be that AT&T has changed their policies to only allow one connection to
their server from any given computer (to prevent what's called a "Denial of
Service" attack), which would explain your problem. Outlook 2003 deals with
this sort of policy (which only recently started getting implemented by
ISPs) by only making one connection to a given server at a time, so you
might solve the problem by upgrading to 2003. In 2002, you could add the
second AT&T account to a different send/receive group that doesn't do
automatic send/receives, and download from that group manually.

 

[Carl]

Two additional notes.

1. Despite the error message, it appears (for now) that
all email is being downloaded from the problem email
account, despite the error message.

2. This problem I described is occurring on my desktop
computer. I am also running Outlook 2002 on my laptop
computer with the same 5 email configurations (identical
configuration of Outlook 2002 on both machines) and I
receive NO errors when sending/receiving email with the
problem account.

 

[Carl]

I read about that in earlier posts, but that does NOT seem
to be the problem.

I say this because I also have Outlook 2002 on my laptop
with the identical configuration as my desktop (5 email
accounts). Using my laptop to check email does NOT
generate any error messages. Using my desktop DOES
generate the error message I described. Both machines are
using the same network connection.

By the looks of some of the other posts, this problem
seems to have surfaced in the past week or so for many of
us.

Any other suggestions?