Problem viewing downloaded mail in a POP3 account

[Gary]

I work the Help Desk at a university and have a user with a problem that I
haven't seen before in Outlook. She's using Outlook 2007 with a POP account.
The user has no problems with downloading and viewing mail in her Inbox.
She moves many messages to different folders she has set up in "Personal
Folders." The problem she's having is that she is unable to view some of the
messages that she's moved. In fact, when you click on the message the only
info that shows up in the preview pane is the header information. If she
double-clicks on the message, she gets the following pop-up:

The operation is not supported until the entire message is downloaded.
Download the message and try again.

I don't know what to make of this. Another thing worth mentioning is that
these messages have the normal open envelope next to them along with what
appears to be a piece of paper in the landscape setting with its upper
right-hand corner folded over. I don't know if that means anything. I'd
greatly appreciate any help/support/insight that can be offered in regards to
this problem. Thank you.

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

gary wrote on Wed, 03 December 2008 08:4

I work the Help Desk at a university and have a user with a problem that I
haven't seen before in Outlook. She's using Outlook 2007 with a POP account.
The user has no problems with downloading and viewing mail in her Inbox.
She moves many messages to different folders she has set up in "Personal
Folders." The problem she's having is that she is unable to view some of the
messages that she's moved. In fact, when you click on the message the only
info that shows up in the preview pane is the header information. If she
double-clicks on the message, she gets the following pop-up:

The operation is not supported until the entire message is downloaded.
Download the message and try again.

I don't know what to make of this. Another thing worth mentioning is that
these messages have the normal open envelope next to them along with what
appears to be a piece of paper in the landscape setting with its upper
right-hand corner folded over. I don't know if that means anything. I'd
greatly appreciate any help/support/insight that can be offered in regards to
this problem. Thank you

Is she downloading the messages and reading them before moving them? What you are describing happens when only headers are downloaded.
--
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]



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[Gary]

Diane,

Thank you for your response. You stated that what I mentioned only happens
when headers are downloaded. The interesting thing is that the user
originally called in because there were two messages that she could not read.
One was 4MB and the other 980kb. When she'd SINGLE-click on them, she'd get
the following message:


This item cannot be displayed in the reading pane. The item has not been
received from the server.

When double-clicking on the message, this message would appear:

This item has not been received from the server. Do you want to:

1) Unmark this header item
2) Mark to download this message
3) Mark to download this message and leave a copy on the server
4) Mark to delete this message from the server

Please note that I numbered those for purposes of this post. I fixed this
problem by having the user press Control+Alt+S in Outlook to open the
Send/Receive options. I chose Edit and discovered that under Folder Options
the option was selected to "Download Headers only for items larger than..."
There was a number put in there, but I don't remember what it was. Once I
deselected that option the user was able to look at her two messages.

The emails that I mentioned originally in this post are dated BEFORE the fix
I just wrote about. I'm wondering if that's the problem. Perhaps those
messages that she's getting the error message with were larger than the size
allowed under "Folder Options" in the Send/Receive Options. Could that be
the problem? If so, let's say that some of the messages were much smaller
than the number typed in. For example, if she had a 2kb message that she was
originally able to read, but can't now, what could the problem be?

I believe that she was orginally able to read the messages when they came
into the Inbox, but now she cannot for some reason. Thank you.