Some bizarre anti microsoft activity with browsers and entourage

I

ichabodc

Hola

I am having a problem with my mac mini 1.25/1 Tiger 10.4.7

Before I start please note that this mail is not about adding hotmail
accounts to entourage. Please read the whole message to get an
understanding of whole problem.

Now to my problem, on Friday morning I turned on my macmini as usual, I
opened Entourage and found I could not receive mail into entourage from
hotmail, I have 3 hotmail accounts and another non hotmail account set
up in entourage. The non hotmail account works fine, none of the
hotmail ones do.

These are not new accounts with a new entourage, these accounts were
working on Thursday night before I went to bed and when I turned my mac
on Friday mail didn't work

I have had my hotmail accounts for over 7 years and thus MSN allowed me
to go off line with the accounts when they went web based . So I have
used off line hotmail account with mac for over 4 years and on this
macmini for over a year and the accounts have been working fine until
Friday

The error codes I get are for one account "reached end of file" and for
the other two "connection to the server failed or was dropped" -3253.

Now, I have checked with my ISP and there are no faults found at their
end, I am not running a firewall and the first time this happened was
straight after start and all mail was working fine before close down

Whilst being annoyed at this I thought well I can use web based mail,
that's when things started getting fishier. I can't access
www.hotmail.com through Safari, Firefox or IE5. I can log onto
Messenger but not access the messages from there. So I went to look for
a microsoft update and I can't get to any microsoft sites. I can't
access MSN either but can access nineMSN.com.au, the local MSN network.
On all browser the requests just time out

I've spent hours searching for relevant articles on the net, in forums
and looking through libraries and cleaning caches, Oh and I recently
loaded little snitch, after the microsoft problem arose, to check for
unauthorised network traffic and I can see none. I have cleared the
cache in all programs, and reset safari completely. I have checked for
errant entourage temp files and found none. I have pinged both hotmail
and microsoft and I get a response. The only other site I seem to have
issue with is www.iht.com, (again ping successful) some others are
temperamental. (www.smh.com.au) Most sites load properly and are
functioning as normal.

I have also cleared the PRAM, run disk utility on all disks.


I have been able to access my hotmail from other sources

So basically, I am flummoxed, for some reason my mac mini is stopped
getting to microsoft sites.

Anyone got any ideas, as my next step it to boot from the master Tiger
disk and I was trying to avoid doing this

Fingers crossed you folks will help
 
D

Diane Ross

The error codes I get are for one account "reached end of file" and for
the other two "connection to the server failed or was dropped" -3253.
Click to expand...

The file that has reached it's end is often the preferences file. Move the
'Microsoft' folder out of your local preferences folder and try again. If
this fails, end of file means the file is too corrupted to rebuild.

We don't have the -3253 error listed on the Error Page
<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/error/page.html>

I haven't received the -3253 error, but I often see "connection to the
server failed or was dropped" when there is a problem message. When this
happens I use my webmail access to find the offending message (s) and
delete. I have seen cases where Mail will download the messages that stall
on Entourage without problem.

If you are still having problem after trying new preferences, go through the
troubleshooting steps here:

<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/troubleshoot/basics.html>

--
Diane Ross, Microsoft Mac MVP
Entourage Help Page
<http://www.entourage.mvps.org/>
The Entourage Blog lists the EHP as one of the top five Microsoft Entourage
resources.
<http://blogs.msdn.com/entourage/>
 
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