Outlook 2003 SP1 crash on receiving mail

[reinard]

Hey all,

I'm looking for help on a problem that's been keeping me stumped for
about a week now and I can't seem to find any good ideas on what to try
next.

This is a brand new laptop, which with I purchased MS Office 2003 SBE.
Aside from Firefox, Putty, Winscp and a couple other utilities, I have
not installed anything on this machine. It's a Compaq Presario X6000.

The exact version of Oulook I'm running (from the about page) is 2003
(11.6359.6408) SP1

All availabe office updates are installed.

A little background on the situation:

I'm trying to download mail from a POP3 server. Out of habit I keep
about 1 year worth of email on the server, so there are about 31k
messages (~250MB) sitting on the server.

I configure Outlook for the account, with the option to leave the
messages on the server enabled.

The download goes fine. I have tried interrupting it after a few
hundred and few thousand messages by hitting cancel, closing outlook,
restarting the computer and then re-connecting, and everything behaves
as one would expect.

If I let the download complete Outlook will crash after downloading the
last message (the last message is not the problem as I've tried this
about 20 times over the last week, and new messages received during
that time are downloaded if it is the very first time I try to
download). Any time after this if I try to Send and Receive, it goes
through sending, and crashes before asking me for my password (which I
don't let autolook remember) when it gets to the receiving mail part.

The tray icon displays a message if I hover over it saying "Microsoft
Office Outlook is synchronizing folders." which doesn't make much sense
to me for a POP3 account, but then I figure it's probably just a
generic message.

The POP3 server is not an exchange server.

The details of the error are:
AppName: outlook.exe
AppVer: 11.0.6353.0
AppStamp: 408f2937
ModName: msmapi32.dll
ModVer: 11.0.6361.0
ModStamp: 40da1177
fDebug: 0
Offset: 00014382

Things I have tried with no success, some several times and in
different combinations:
- Outlook safe mode
- Repairing Office
- Reinstalling Office
- Chaning my username on the server (used to have an @ symbol in it..)
- Uninstalling Norton Anit Virus
- Completely uninstalling office, deleting all pst files and mail
profiles, reinstalling, reupdating

The thing is, Outlook itself works fine. If I (quickly) disable sending
and receiving, I can do anything to the mail I want, sort it, delete
it, manage contacts, tasks and so on.

From what little I have been able to find online, it's possible that

the profile gets corrupted, and the default response from those in the
know in these situations appears to be to suggest to create a new mail
profile.

The problem is, this initially works, except after the mail is
downloaded I'm where I started.

Anything else I can try? Anything I may have missed? Any super-secret
registry setting or check box that can help me here?

Thanks in advance for taking the time to read this and / or respond.

 

[Vince Averello [MVP-Outlook]]

Have you tried removing some of the messages from your mailbox with another
utility or a webmail reader? Alternately, you could forward some to a GMail
account and get them from there.

 

[reinard]

Thanks for responding.

I could try to remove some messages, especially spam with something
like mail2web.com, but what I'm really after here is fixing the problem
not the symptom.

Do you think there is a particular message that causes Outlook to
behave this way? I don't think so, since as long as I don't try to
receive new mail, everything works fine. I can browse, sort, delete, do
anything i want to email. So I don't think anything about the .pst file
is corrupt.

I'm not sure how you mean the forwarding thing. The emails are stored
on a POP3 server, I can't just easily forward them. I could log onto
the account with some other utility and manually forward messages, but
I'm not sure what that would buy me. I have other means to access my
mail (I use mutt on a FreeBSD box as well), so I can read my mail and
receive it if I want, but I really want my expensive new copy of
Outlook to be able to handle my mail.

If you have any other ideas on what I could try I'm all ear. I'll try
and delete some of the spam, but it will take ages to make any
significant dent in the amount of mail.

 

[Vince Averello [MVP-Outlook]]

It could be a message issue. I've seen it a lot of times. Does Outlook
always crash on the same message number?