I gave up Outlook at last a few months ago and moved to Mozilla Thunderbird. Turns out I didn’t miss it nearly as much as I thought I would. And the IMAP support in T-bird is excellent, the whole thing remarkably stable. Best of all, the built-in Bayesian spam filtering is uncanny and effective. I didn’t miss the Outlook crashes, freezes, corruptions…
So why am I running Outlook again? Well, this is actually about how to fix Outlook when it can’t connect…
I got an iPAQ H2210, which comes with ActiveSync, which works with Outlook, and it comes on the CD (Outlook 2002). So I loaded it up and sure enough, the sync is smooth and the PocketPC apps are like well-heeled and slimmed-down cousins to Outlook. So I got seduced into running it again for a bit, though I haven’t figured out what to do about the spam that gets past SpamAssasin on my server (which isn’t much).
But it turns out that some things haven’t changed much in Outlook-land, and after a day of happily pulling my mail down it just stopped. Froze up and refused to connect. Ever get this error?
Protocol: IMAP, Server Response: '', Port: 143, Secure(SSL): No, Error Number: 0x800CCC0E
Or something like it. I also got 0x800CCC0F, but it boils down to Outlook not being able to connect to the server. I tried editing the account settings, no good. I checked with Outlook Express, same errors. Aha. T-bird? Working fine. Something in the MS stack. Here’s what I tried and what worked:
- Deleting and recreating the account worked in Outlook Express, failed to help in Outlook
- Setting the timeout to 2 minutes instead of 1 (thanks to Daniel Gross for this one) seems to have done the trick (incomprehensibly, since OE was working with 1 minute)
Truth is, at one point Outlook was showing an account but wouldn’t allow me to edit or remove it, so I went into the registry, searched on the mail server value, and manually removed that account definition. Reckless, I’ll admit, but it may have helped too.
Since Microsoft doesn’t seem to offer support for free anymore, and HP’s idea of OEM support for the CD software was a voicemail maze that dumped me when I pressed “0″ for help, I’m thinking that commercial software doesn’t have as much of an argument over open source these days.
As for the iPAQ, I love it, but the bindings to MS products are clear and tight. And the struggles with MS products can be trying.
And I’m not giving up T-Bird anytime soon.
Daniel de Segovia Gross | 28-Nov-03 at 7:35 pm | Permalink
The reason timeout tweeks work in Ooutlook, and not in OE, is because the 2 products have little more than the name “Outlook” in common. OE was developed by an Internet Explorer splinter group, back during the Browser Wars, to ensure MS wouldn’t lose in a functional-completeness match-up against Netscape.
Outlook was an older and more serious endeavor, since it was slated for integration into Office from the start. The development teams and codebases for Outlook and OE were separate, and to the best of my knowledge, remain so.
Douglas Stumberger, one of the dev-team members on Outlook 1.0, was a college buddy of mine. He went to MS after a few years in the Bell Labs AI group with dreams of making a sexy product for an already unsexy software company. We had epic shouting matches on the phone and many flame-threads of email as I argued for building Outlook on a relational database an Doug said that wasn’t “realistic.”
What I really want is Enlightenment For Windows. But T-Bird sounds worth a try, too.