I have a Dell 8300 Desktop that came with MS Office 2003 Small Business Edition that includes Outlook. The PC also has Outlook Express. I have a Mindspring POP mail account for which I use Outlook to send/receive emails and I have had no issues until 12/20/2005. At that time, I suddenly lost connection to the POP3 and SMTP servers. My broadband connection is Roadrunner. The error code I receive for Outlook is '0x8004210B' which is a timeout message. If I try to "test account settings" in the account setup, the message for both servers is that the server is found but cannot connect to them. Since Outlook has been failing, I tried to use Outlook Express on the same machine but with same results. Oddly, on another PC (Dell 8400), I can set up the Mindspring id with the same server information and I can send and receive mail with no issues. So, can I reasonably conclude the issue is not with the servers themselves (or passwords)? I spent some time on chat with the Earthlink tech support. They were suspicious of the Norton Anti-virus software. I turned off the email scanning (incoming and outgoing) but same failure. Norton does not seem to be the issue (see other PC). I just installed the MS Office Service Pack 2 (didn't help this issue) and I have discovered that there is a Service Pack 3. Should I proceed with this? Can anyone help me figure out why I have lost connection with my email on this desktop? Thanks for your help in advance.

Tim Reilly

Do you have a firewall running?? This may cause you not to be able to connect. also have you tried creating your account from scratch on outlook??? let me know plz thx dave

Hey there reillytj,

Sounds like it is a problem caused by either firewall/outlook or Nav.

Your answer to dave2312uk question will help us with the firewall section.

1. Have you tried uninstalling outlook and reinstalling it
2. Have you tried to uninstall Nav and see whether you can send/receive emails.

Next, try send an email and while it is sending, go into command prompt and run the command netstat -b.
This will show what connections are being made and to where, if there is a connection on port 25 to localhost, then it is most likely an antivirus issue.

In answer to Dave2312uk, I have Norton Personal Firewall 2005. First, I tried just setting up my email account from scratch did not work. However, when I uninstalled Norton Firewall, my Outlook worked fine. Then I reinstalled Norton Firewall and made the setting for Outlook to "Permit all". The receive/send failed for an interrupted connection (error code 0x800CCC0F). But, when I just disable Norton Firewall, Outlook works fine. To Zimbo's suggestion on the command line during a send, when the firewall was still enabled, I tried sending a message. I then did 'netstat -b' at the command line and received:

TCP, Local address: Alan-Tim:1061, Foreign address: pop5.mindspring.com:POP3, State: Time_wait, PID: 0.

How can I get around the firewall blocking the connection? Another firewall?

TIm

Yup...and there are plenty of free ones out there. Check out our downloads sections for some ideas

I will definitely check out other alternatives but are there some ways to customize the connection permissions for Outlook within Norton Personal Firewall?

Tim