outlook express woes

[reet]

guys and gals.....I need some suggestions. My in-laws are not computer literate so I don't feel that it is something they have done. They won't touch anything that you don't tell them to. They use Prodigy for their internet service. They live in the country so their connection is only 24400 on a really good day. Probably for the past 3 months, when they check their email using Outlook Express they can never finish receiving their email. It just pretty much stops. You can stop the download, log out and back on, only to receive the emails that they already have gotten, of course, but it will just quit receiving. No error messages. Prodigy has a mail link set up through their web page called MailLink. On several occasions, I have had to download their mail from there, and received all the emails with no delay. No hangups, no viruses. My mother-in-law, loves contests and household websites, and receives alot of emails from those sites, but none seem to be large emails. So by going through there, this deletes out their web-emails and starts them fresh for outlook express. But when she logs into outlook express, any new mails received are once again the same probelem of not completely downloading. Different batch of emails, same problem. I have compared her settings to mine and they are identical. She doesn't check her mail every day, maybe once or twice a week at the most. This past weekend, it had been about 3 weeks since she had checked her mail, due to personal reasons, and she had about 400 emails! All junk and contest stuff, but again nothing large. Had to do it through MailLink and just delete everything. Any suggestions (other than for her to quit entering contests ). I thought at first it was because the connection is so slow, but everything downloads through MailLink. Sorry to ramble so much BTW...........

[Statica]

2 things worth checking:

Make sure that they delete mails from server once they have downloaded the mails. If OE parses through the mailserver trying to decide which mail is new and which is old its going to take much longer.
In OE: TOOLS menu > Accounts > Mail > PROPERTIES of the account you want > ADVANCED tab. Make sure that the: Leave a copy of messages on server is UNchecked.

Try having them increase wait time of outlook express for server to respond. Same place as the aforementioned and increase Server timeout to about 2 minutes for slower connxn.

Have always found that the front end is always the bottleneck, the best way to read mail especially for a high volume of mails is using telnet.

Also would be helpful if you could tell us whether its an IMAP or a POP3 server.

[reet]

leave copy on server is unchecked. using pop3 for email.will extend the timeout setting to see if that helps. I think it is already set on about 2 minutes, but I'll double check this weekend.

[Statica]

to ensure that it isnt their side that is the issue, tell them to open a dos prompt before starting OE, and pinging the mail server constantly. Check on packetloss ratio.

[glc]

This is a known issue with Outlook Express, and increasing the timeout settings may not help much. The only ways around it are these:

1. Check your mail a LOT more often.
2. Try a different E-mail client.
3. Teach them how to use the webmail facility.

I had to deal with this with a customer. Finally had to have the ISP delete their mailbox and create a new one because nothing would get the backlog unstuck. Large quantities of e-mail and a slow connection just cause major problems.

Here is a neat way around this - Pegasus Mail has a feature called "selective mail download" - this downloads only the headers - and you then can flag each one for deletion off the server, download, or both. This is essentially what you are doing with the webmail interface.

[mosquito]

When I have mail that is stuck on the server I connect to the server using telnet.

To do so start command prompt and type

telnet mail.server.com 110

where mail.server.com is your pop mail server.

When that is completed you will see something like "+OK pop blablabla" this means that you are connected to the mail server.
Then you have to authenticate. type

user username

where username is your accountname of the mailbox. You will see that the text you type will not be echoed on screen (that is normal)
When you received a +OK from the mailserver you can enter your password by typing

pass password

where password is the password of your mailbox.
Once that is finished you should be connected to the mailbox.

Type "list" to see the list of mails available.
Type "dele" to set the delete flag for a message (the message will be deleted once you disconnect.)
Type "top 1 10" when you want to see the first 10 lines of message 1.
Type "quit" to disconnect.

Check this link to see all possible comands http://info.internet.isi.edu/in-note...es/rfc1939.txt

[Xayd]

Or, seeing as you're dealing with the computer illiterate here, teaching them how to 'command line through' their email might be an exercise in futility .

You can use http://www.mailstart.com to check your mail once per week for free, including send, reply, forward, and delete.

I'd have them get their mail from mailstart, then delete it all from there to start fresh. If they're like the in-laws and grandparent-types I know of, they very well may have 30 megs of baby pictures in their mailboxes, and be over their ISP's quota for mail. Either way they should be able to get it all and delete it from mailstart. What you're describing seems to indicate to me that they likely have either a) a corrupted message on the server that's causing a problem or b) an attachment that's too large for their transfer/size quota.

Xayd