Help needed from f-listy techs

[selenay]

Techy geeks on my f-list, help needed!

I do the techy work on a website for some Quakers back in England. This
includes setting up email addresses on the domain when needed. Last week I
was emailed by one of the members because one of the was not downloading
correctly into Outlook Express.

Many emails later (this guy is not techy, although his son apparently works
for an anti-virus company and tried to 'help' before he emailed me, and it
took a long time to find out what is happening beyond "It doesn't work!") we
have established that Outlook connects to the server, tries to download the
emails, and then chokes with a timeout error - the code is apparently
0x800ccc19. He can send emails through that address with no problems.

Googling that code, the only thing that I can find is references to
anti-virus software intefering with the download. The suggested fix is to
turn off email scanning and try to download, then turn scanning back on.
We've tried that, no dice. I can't be sure that he actually managed to
disable email scanning (really not techy, scarily not techy) but I am taking
his word for it.

We have established that I can download the emails from this address and
that he can download the emails from the rest of his addresses on this
domain, so I'm now confident that the issue is not the server. There is a
large email with some photos attached waiting to be downloaded, which I
thought might be the issue. Perhaps his anti-virus was trying to scan it and
causing the time out? So I forwarded it to another of his addresses attached
to the Quaker domain and he was able to download that email without issue.

I'm going to delete that email from the problem address and see whether that
fixes things, but I am not hopeful.

Does anyone have any more suggestions for things that I can try? Technically
this isn't my problem (so I won't be getting paid, grr) but getting this guy
to believe that it's not my problem isn't going to happen. I'm pretty sure
that it's something either in his email set-up (his sone fiddled with many
settings, apparently) or somewhere else in his computer settings, but I am
out of ideas and so is Google.

The only other thing that I can think of is that it is one of the other
emails waiting to be downloaded (none of the others have attachments), but
the only way to check that is to delete all the emails from the address and
he is not going for that option.

Help?

Comments

[nic]

The first thing I thought when I read this is that maybe he's screwed up the password on his end?

Otherwise, I agree that deleting the 'huge' email might solve the problem. Good luck....

[selenay]

His son was fiddling with settings, so it's not impossible that the password is screwed up...

The email is only 700kb, but I remember the days when an email that size would kill my dial-up connection. I've deleted it and emailed him with details, plus the webmail address (my host hid that info really well) and a 'reminder' of what his password is so that he can experiment if this isn't the email causing the issue.

I'd forgotten how painful it could be walking non-techys through things.

[gmul.livejournal.com]

A cursory reading suggests deleting the email might do the trick. There may be a timeout setting in OE, or it could be the AV although you said it could download it when sent to another address? (Irritating aside - we've discovered that with Symantec Endpoint Protection, if you exclude something from being scanned it still scans it (thus screwing up QuickBooks, in this case) but just ignores the result...)

Looking at pop3uidl references might help otherwise. May depend what version of OE he's running - if he's really not techie and the son's not a lot of use either then it may still be a quite old version.

I think it's unlikely to be one of the other emails causing a problem as they're downloaded one at a time as far as I remember, so it won't do the next one until it has finished with the first.

[selenay]

I feel much better knowing that fellow geek thinks I'm on the right path :-) Or at least, not crazy for suggesting the things I've suggested.

It's not outside the realms of possibility that he's running a v. old version of OE and I've got no idea how to sort that out - he's 3,000 miles away in a different time zone and the hand-holding that I can do is a bit limited.

If only everyone would run sensible email programs :-D

Anyway, I've deleted the offending email and let him know to try again. I've also found the webmail address (the host doesn't like advertising it - a rant for another day) and 'reminded' him of the password so that he can log in and experiment if purging this email doesn't help.

If he still can't get things sorted out then I've got no ideas. All his other email addresses download fine in OE, there's nothing going wrong at the server end and that strongly points towards the issue being in his settings for that address. Considering how many emails it took just to get information more useful than "it doesn't work", I'm not sure how long it would take to get settings etc. checked. Perhaps this is when I suggest that he find a tech on his side of the Pond to actually look at his computer?

[gmul.livejournal.com]

I can always point our sales person in their general direction! I'm "sure" it would make a nice change for our first/second line people to be dealing with OE rather than Outlook proper...