Outlook is bugged--stops sending email.

S

Stephen Porter

Help! Strange things have begun happening to some of the
computers on our small network. There are 7 computers on a
simple network. All the computers involved are running Windows
2000 and Office/Outlook 2000. Outlook is not running on an
Exchange server--each station has its own copy and receives all
the mail for the company. Norton Systemworks 2003 and the
corresponding Norton Anti-Virus is running on all the machines
and is set to scan both incoming and outgoing email. Internet
connection is via a DSL account. There have been essentially
no problems with Outlook/email on the network for the past
several years.

Recently two of the computers started timing out when sending
email. Error message indicated that "Connection to the server
was unexpectedly broken" (paraphase). These types of problems
usually end up on my plate and when the problem persisted for a
couple of days one of the users told me that the problem had
started after he had opened an email from a client that had an
attachment, which was one of those internet scam chain letters
of the "I have 20 million dollars...." variety. He said this
particular email had been opened only on two machines and both
those machines had lost the ability to get email sent out.
(BTW, all other machines on the network were working fine, so I
ruled out anything really being wrong at the ISP's SMTP server.)

With the NAV outgoing email scan enabled, messages would
*appear* to be sent--they would disappear from the Outbox and
show up in the "Sent Items" folder, BUT, then the NAV scan would
time out. I checked all the normal settings and when nothing
seemed to be wrong, I first disabled the NAV scan of outgoing
email, but the only change there was that the attempted sends
now stayed in the Outbox as unsent. Then I completed
uninstalled Norton Systemworks from one of the computers with
the results the same--no send, messages remain in Outbox.

I called Microsoft and paid for a support incident. I have had
very mixed results with them in the past and this time was
extremely disappointing. The tech rep seemed to have very
little understanding of Outlook (even to ME!!!) but insisted
that the error message had something to do with Norton Anti-
Virus. I told her that NAV was completely GONE from one of the
computers experiencing the problem. She said she would try to
get someone with more ideas to call me back.

Then I tried a "repair" install of Office 2000 on the computer
without NAV, and voila! Working again. Feeling pretty good, I
reinstalled Norton Systemworks and that seemed fine also. I
did the same thing with the second offending computer--did a
"repair" install and that one started working again, even
without un-installing Systemsworks/NAV at all.

So I thought I had solved everything...until....

Two days later the problem showed up on a 3rd computer, AND the
original offending computer started acting up again. (More
background: all these computers were checked for viruses with
Norton and two of them were also checked for Spyware as part of
the "fix.") The 2nd computer continued (and continues) to run
fine. I was able to get both of the malfunctioning computers to
run again, but it was much harder than the first time. I had
to uninstall NAV/Sysworks completely, run the "repair,"
reinstall Sysworks, then "Modify" Sysworks so that the only
remaining component was NAV itself. This was done on the
theory that some other component in Sysworks was causing some
problem that was corrupting Outlook. Whether or not this is
true, I dunno... but that's what worked. On the second
computer I just uninstalled NAV/Sysworks and ran the "Repair" of
Office. I then bought a brand new copy of NAV--without all the
extra Systemworks stuff and installed that. That one is
working again. So all three computers were running properly
and under the protection (???) of NAV and I was hoping that was
the end of it.

But...today the manager called me from the office (closed on
Mondays) and told me his computer, which had been working fine
during all of this previous trouble was refusing to send out
email. He spoke with Microsoft under the same repair ticket and
was told to open up Outlook in Safe Mode, disable some items in
the the Add-In Manager, and the Com Ad-Ins, and also did some
changes to the Registry. He called me saying that everything
was FIXED!!! But even as we talked on the phone the problem
returned...so that wasn't the entire answer, for sure.

I've got to go back in tomorrow and I'll attempt my previous
"fix" and hope that handles his computer also. But I'm
starting to think that something is amiss and am hoping for some
ideas/help here.

My current theory is that perhaps Norton SystemWorks, through
LiveUpdate, is subtly changing something in Outlook's internals
so that this problem manifests on a machine that has run
LiveUpdate and been affected. As I mentioned, there are no
viruses or known Spyware showing up, but of course if Symantec
is inadvertently causing the problem in the first place I'm sure
they'd be the last to tell me.

Bottom line is I have no clue as to what is actually causing
this strange behavior, but I'd sure like to find out and get it
stably handled. Maybe my "Repair" install and installing a
stripped-down NAV-only, will work.

If you've read this far, well, thanks! All pointers and
suggestions appreciated.

TIA.
 
D

Diane Poremsky [MVP]

It's a problem with NAV - we recommend disabling the email scanning,
especially if your version uses a pop proxy (outlook shows servers as
localhost if it's using pop proxy). If you also use the Norton firewall,
disable it (replace it with a different firewall if you don't have a router
acting as a firewall.)

--
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
Author, Teach Yourself Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours
Coauthor, OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide)
Author, Google and Other Search Engines (Visual QuickStart Guide)



Join OneNote Tips mailing list: http://www.onenote-tips.net/
 
J

Jim mc

Hi Stephen
NAV does not catch everything, and if you have a trojan / worm (eg Blaster)
that uses your address book as a mail source it may explain high activity
and therefore timeouts.
It is common for these to fox the AV software (by camouflage) once
established, as most of the av software in mail acts when the virus moves
in. Try running specific fixers from the web (eg blaster fix from Symantec),
and make sure you do a "suspiscious exe" scan. I find ESET NOD-32 better
than NAV. In the end though, get a firewall - cheaper than recovery!!
Jim Mc
 
S

Stephen Porter

If anyone is interested, here's the outcome of the problem with
email sending. (See long original post here...)

I either got luck and got someone on an Outlook "team" in Canada
somewhere who tried a lot of interesting and logical
troubleshooting. No joy, but she then hooked me up with a high-
level networking engineer and we ran tests that determined that
nothing in Outlook's/Windows internal networking had gotten
corrupted. He then took a lot of extra care and time to hook
me up with an Enterprise Messaging team member. He and I spent
another couple of hours poking around until we finally got an
error message that was a bit different than most of the ones we
had been getting up till then. He was then able to find
something in Microsoft's tech support databases that pointed to
a timing problem with the Linksys router on our network.
Apparently if/when ISP's get their servers configured or
reconfigured in a certain way, the Linksys' default MTU setting
(which I believe is just "fast as possible") can errors that
cause the timing out, bad response problem. As soon as we
reconfigured the router's MTU setting to the value recommended
in a Linksys tech bulletin everything went back to normal,
including Norton scanning incoming and outgoing email.

It seems that these kinds of things always have some simple
ending, but discovering the solution is like the proverbial
needle in the haystack. I really have to hand it to Microsoft,
though because they stuck with it and finally came up with the
fix.

I hope this gets Googled and anyone with a similar problem can
find it useful.

Thanks to Diane and Jim also for their input.

Best regards,
Stephen Porter
 
B

Brian Tillman

Stephen Porter said:
He was then able to find
something in Microsoft's tech support databases that pointed to
a timing problem with the Linksys router on our network.
Apparently if/when ISP's get their servers configured or
reconfigured in a certain way, the Linksys' default MTU setting ....snip...
I hope this gets Googled and anyone with a similar problem can
find it useful.

This issue with Linksys routers has been available by Google for at least
the last several months.
 

Ask a Question

Want to reply to this thread or ask your own question?

You'll need to choose a username for the site, which only take a couple of moments. After that, you can post your question and our members will help you out.

Ask a Question

Top