no incoming e-mails

A friend called last night to ask for help but i have never seen this before.
He has a laptop about 6 or 7 years old with Windows XP home installed so i assume his e-mail client is Outlook 2002 and he can send e-mails but can not receive them, this only started yesterday.
I asked had he installed any applications and he said no.
The laptop was absolutely full C" disk is 20mb and "D" is 44mb and it had 44mb of files in it so i transferred his "D" disk to an external drive and then formatted it just to see if the space was the problem but it was still the same.
I am not very good with XP so any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
Bill

 

Hey BILL,
Just off the top of my head, he should double check his email settings - retype the username and password in the configuration regardless of the email program used and double check his server settings.
Also, if he does have Office, there is a detect and repair setting under the help tab IIRC.

 

Good morning...

You might also check the inbox, delete any suspicious e-mails that can block the mailbox - e-mails that have no 'From' or corrupted spam e-mails can cause Outlook/Outlook Express to hang, especially the older versions...

 

If he accesses his email account via web browser and looks at his online Inbox, he should see the recent messages he has not been able to download and he may be able to identify the specific message that was the first one to fail to download to Outlook/Outlook Express. If so, try deleting it there and see whether that resolves the problem.

 

Could the overall file size of the *.pst or whatever be a factor? Empty the trash and compress it?