Re: Outlook and Outlook Express die....after a while.

From: Vanguardx (see_signature)
Date: 09/24/04 

Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2004 04:34:41 -0500

"Tom Koch" <spamtrap@insideoe.tomsterdam.com>
wrote in news:%23ycM5JaoEHA.3252@TK2MSFTNGP14.phx.gbl:
> In news:ORAWI4ZoEHA.3900@TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl,
> bobray <pope@pcc.net> typed:
>> "Lately" (the last 3 weeks or so....) I've been having a problem with
>> Outlook (2003) and Outlook Express (6)...they seem to work fine for
>> several hours and then fail with this error ;
>>
>> Your server has unexpectedly terminated the connection. Possible
>> causes for this include server problems, network problems, or a long
>> period of inactivity. Account: 'blah@blah.com, Server:
>> 'pop.blah.com', Protocol: POP3, Port: 110, Secure(SSL): No, Error
>> Number: 0x800CCC0F
>> Same error for both programs...rebooting "fixes" this for another 6-8
>> hours. I've looked in the knowledgebase at that error msg and
>> number...but it doesn't seem to refer to anything with the pc or my
>> particular setup. I'm figuring that something is dying after a
>> bit...and rebooting fixes it.
>
> Maybe your IP address is expiring? Are you connected to the Internet
> by way of a router?

Even if a DHCP-assigned IP address expires, it should continue to be
assigned to you as long as you maintain a connection; i.e., it may
expire but remains assigned to you until you disconnect. I am not aware
that broadband cable actually disconnects the session. However, DSL
will disconnect. From my understanding of DSL, it is still like a
dial-up connection but users aren't aware of this because the "dial-up
and handshake" (the PPPoE Discovery Phase) occurs in a fraction of a
second (2nd bullet under Introduction at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/maintain/pppoe.mspx).
That is, you lose your connection and when you next need it again then a
new connection is established. When using DSL, somewhere in your the
PPPoE configuration for your LAN connectoid or router, whichever is
connected to the DSL bridge, there might be a keep-alive option. There
isn't any setting for how long to keep the session probably because this
is configured on the ISP's server end.

In my NAT router, and when using PPPoE (Point-to-Point Protocol Over
Ethernet) to connect it to a DSL modem, there is an "Auto-Reconnect"
option that must be enabled (and is enabled by default, for me, when
PPPoE is selected). That doesn't stop the disconnect but it does an
automatic reconnect when the session is lost (i.e., disconnected). I
suppose if there is little or no looseness in IP assignments from the
ISP's DHCP server (i.e., how many are free or in reserve) that you would
get a new IP address on each auto-reconnect; i.e., with a high count of
concurrent users and if there are few free IP addresses then it is
unlikely that you will get reassigned the same IP address after it
expires *and* after you disconnect. However, I don't see how getting
assigned a new IP address from the DHCP server would cause Outlook
[Express] to stop functioning. It does not maintain nor require a
persistent connection. One mail poll using one IP address and a
subsequent mail poll while under a different IP address should make no
difference in the ability of the e-mail client to connect to the mail
server.

Maybe a change of your IP address between separate connections to the
mail server is the the problem but I don't get it. Everytime you use
analog dial-up services to your ISP to connect to their mail server it
is highly likely that you have a different IP address for each connect,
especially if you configure a disconnect after the network connection is
no longer required. The IP address you got assigned lingers as long as
you maintain a connection regardless that it has expired so it isn't
changing during your connection. The e-mail client doesn't maintain a
persistent connection (i.e., mail session) with the server host just
because it is loaded in memory and a window appears for it. In fact,
you can leave Outlook [Express] loaded all the time and configure the
Internet Options -> Connect dial-up settings to "Dial whenever a network
connection is not present" and configure the advanced settings to
"Disconnect when a network connection may no longer be needed". Then
every mail session will have a new dial-up connect and very probably a
new IP address but you are still polling using the same instance of
Outlook [Express].

As I recall, the "unexpectedly terminated the connection" error occurs
*during* a mail poll (i.e., when the e-mail client has connected to the
server and is then issuing commands), not when the e-mail client is
trying to get a connection. I should be able to load Outlook, do a mail
poll, and before it does another mail poll I can run "ipconfig /release
*", "ipconfig /flushdns", and "ipconfig /renew" to end up with a new IP
address and the next mail poll from the still loaded Outlook should
succeed. The recipient host (server) only needs to know the current IP
adddress of the source host during that connection instance to know
where to return the requested traffic.

If you start dropping too many packets (or too many get lost that were
sent to you) then you can encounter in-session timeouts. The packet
drops (loss) result in retries that take more time, and that might
accrue to too much time if there was too much loss so the delay causes a
timeout. With Outlook [Express], I've seen mail session problems begin
with as little as 4% packet loss. Other clients seem to be more
tolerant so it doesn't look to be a server-side timeout problem during
the mail session. Browsers are more lenient so you usually can continue
browsing albeit slower while you are having e-mail troubles. Do the
following at the time the e-mail problem occurs:

    ping -n 100 <domain>

You can pick just about any domain if your mail server is within a few
hops of you since the routes to the mail server and through the front
end of your ISP's domain before it branches off to the target domain for
the ping will probably use most of the same hosts. Don't just run the
ping command without parameters; it defaults to only 4 pings and that is
obviously not a large enough sample to get a reasonable measure of
packet loss (1 packet lost out of 4 is a whopping 25% loss whereas it
might've been really 1 out of a 100; more granularity results in a more
accurate measurement, as long as the measurement isn't so long that it
extends far beyond the time when the problem exists). Some sites won't
respond to ping so you need to pick one that does respond. You might
try your mail server, your ISP's home page, www.yahoo.com, or anything
else that reliably responds to ping (the techs for my ISP actually told
me to NOT use their home page because ping results may not be reliable
from there, so I ping to Yahoo).

If you get a high packet loss then you'll have lots of retries which
causes delays that could be long enough to cause timeouts. Just the
other day I started to have e-mail problems in Outlook and for newgroups
in OE. The ping showed I had anywhere from 20% to 56% packet loss (way,
WAY too high). As packet loss went down then I could start to use
newsgroups (and browsing would stop timing out or get faster). I don't
have a good feeling for how much packet loss is too much loss. Usually
it is over 10% when I start noticing e-mail problems but I do recall
once when there were in-session timeouts that ping reported a packet
loss of only 4% (but then the measurement wasn't made at the exact
moment that I was doing the mail poll and incurred the timeout).

There is no setting in Outlook [Express], and I haven't seen an option
in other e-mail clients, that lets you configure how long to wait for a
response from a command (either the data expected to get returned or a
status) *after* the connection had already been successfully made to the
mail server. There's no packet loss recovery count or timeout option.
My understanding of the "server timeout" option is only for how long to
wait before giving up on a *connection* attempt to the server, but once
you have the connection then that timeout is irrelevant. I'm not firm
on this conception of the "server timeout" option but I have never found
it to correct or bandage a connection that has already been established
but where there is so much packet loss that the client would still
timeout waiting for returned data or status.

If you are using broadband cable, also check if the Online light is on
constantly. If it is off or blinking then the cable modem has lost the
connection to the ISP's server and you are completely disconnected from
the Internet (so e-mail would only be one of your problems). Usually
the cable modem will pause and then retry so it might recover but your
e-mail client might've done an e-mail poll during the outage.

The problem can also be caused by a firewall. I use Norton Internet
Security (NIS). They have decided to use common client processes
ccApp.exe and ccPxySvc.exe. I have found ccApp.exe can go unresponsive
and so e-mail (and maybe newsgroups) no longer function but I can still
browse. Sometimes ccPxySvc goes unresponsive and I lose browsing.
Disabling the firewall won't help because these processes are, well,
unresponsive. I had to work on a batch file that would unload or kill
processes and services and then restart or reload them in the correct
order to get the firewall responsive again. That would allow me to
restart NIS without have to reboot the computer. That works about half
the time when NIS goes brain dead, so I have to still have reboot about
half the time. So you could try disabling your firewall to see if that
is the cause but then you're unprotected during the test. If you have a
NAT router with a mini-firewall feature then that'll probably provide
enough protection during the test of disabling your software firewall.

You could also try disabling any e-mail scanning by your anti-virus
software. This can cause timeouts, especially for large messages and
even more for e-mails with attachments (since, I suppose, they have to
get decoded from the text-encoded format in the e-mail to their binary
equivalent to then scan for a virus signature). E-mail scanning is a
duplication of AV scanning. Rather than finding the virus in the
encoded portion of the e-mail, it would detect the virus after the
decoding and when saved into a file on the disk. So you are not at risk
by disabling e-mail scanning.

Some other things to try:
- Disable and reenable the LAN connectoid.
- If you have router, use its UI interface via browser to use its Reboot
function. (Not the reset button on the device which resets to the
default settings.) If it doesn't have one, unplug and replug it (i.e.,
power cycle it).
- Unplug the DSL or cable modem, wait a minute, and plug it back in.
(Some have a Reboot function in the UI which might work, but sometimes
you need to do a power cycle.)
- The UI via browser in the DSL/cable modem might show the signal
strength on LAN and WAN sides of it. I browse to http://192.168.100.1/
for my Motorola Surfboard cable modem which shows: Downstream has SNR =
37dB, power = -4 dBmV and Upstream has power = 43dBmV. However, I'm not
familiar with what would be considered "good" values, but your ISP
should know so call them and have them do a line check. 

-- 
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