Outlook Express stalls

I cannot send graphics or attachments in Outlook Express. It stalls and I get the message "Your POP3 server has not responded in 60 seconds. Would you like to waid another 60 seconds for the server to respont? Account: mail.execpc.com. server: mail.execpc.com boxes with wait, stop.

When it stalls, I have to drag the offending email from out folder to drafts and have to restart Outlook express, and often must disconnect and reconnect to the internet. I have dialup. I had used Norton antivirus for 7 years and recently switched to Trend Micro. The problem did not start immeciately, but has started since the switch. Is it a software problem, ISP problem, antivirus problem? My antivirus is set to not scan outgoing mail.

 

Well, no-one else seems to have anything to offer at the moment so I'll see what I can do, though I may be way off track.

Can you both send and receive ordinary emails? If yes, skip the next paragraph. If no, the next paragraph may sort you out completely.

Do you use the same company for email and dial-up? If not, post back before going any further and give details of who the companies are. If yes, keep going in this paragraph. If I correctly identified the company that you use for email, the outgoing mail server setting could be wrong. It's possible that they have been gradually changing over to use only the authmail.core.com outgoing mail server, and have recently dropped the one you are using. I would suggest checking what your settings are recommended to be using these pages, http://www.core.com/webphp/residential/internet/accessnumbers.php*** and http://home.core.com/web/technicalsupport/serversettings/lookup
and then if they need changing, follow the instructions here: http://home.core.com/web/technicalsupport/setup/email/oe.html
and then see if you can send and receive ordinary emails now.

If the above didn't help, here are some more questions:

Have you been able to send pictures before?

If yes, are these that you are trying to send larger ones than you have successfully sent before?

What size are the pictures you are trying to send?

It's possible that the pictures you're trying to send are too big. As I was wandering around the site that I presume to be your email company, I noticed that they recommend pictures shouldn't be over 2mb in size.

Now if we still haven't resolved the problem, next round of questions!

What version of Outlook Express are you using and what version of Windows are you using?

What other security software do you have on your computer and what versions?

 

Yes, I can send and receive ordinary emails, though a couple of times the server has stalled when sending an ordinary email.

I have the same company for my email and ISP, since 1999. They did have me change to authmail.core.com, but that did not help.

I have always been able to send anything, scans, uploaded photos, etc.

Hmmmm. I had tried to send a 3.26 MB MS Word scan that just hung there. I would have been better doing a jpg picture of the page I guess, because I did not need an editable doc. I just rescanned that same page of handwriting several ways. As a picutre, it says 8.96 MB as I scan it, when I save it and then check, it is 906 KB, about the same. As a word doc it is 3.17 MB. How should I scan and send something like that and keep it small?

I looked back, have sent 2 pics at the same time, 1.96 MB each, no problem, though I remember it was slow.

I have:
Outlook Express 6,
Windows XP Home Edition Service Pack 2 5.1.
I've had the computer since Oct 04, had previous computer almost 6 years.

CCleaner v2.03.532 updated and used recently
Lavasoft Ad-Aware SE 1.06r1, updated and used recently
PanicWare Pop-up-stopper 3.1.1012
spybot-search and destroy 1.4 updated and used recently
SpywareBlaster 3.5.1
ZoneAlarm 7.0.408.000
Auglogics Disk Defrag 1.4
SpamFighter 6.0.5
AVG Anti-Spyware 7.5 new
Trend Micro Antivirus 2007

I will try a smaller attachment, see if that works. If I try it now and it stalls, I will lose this connection/message.
I saved the message, successfully sent 135 KB to myself. I also just sent a 3.23 MB to myself. I don’t know how long it took, I went and did other things, like make M&M/choc kiss/pretzel treats. I saw that the stall message had come up, but by and by it let it all go, so I guess it’s kinda OK for now.

I would like to improve the speed of my computer though. What suggestions do you have? I don’t see the list of “do this first” at Geeks forum like there used to be.

 

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=25835
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=106650

I'm making a guess that you wanted one of these threads. Quite possibly the reason you couldn't find them is because only the posts from the last 30 days were showing. There's a little drop-down list to choose what time period you want to see posts from and for things like this, you need to choose "Beginning" and then they should turn up.

Perhaps you can try just leaving it with other emails you're trying to send and see if they actually make it through. Perhaps by responding to the message, it's actually causing the problem you describe. It would be pretty slow to send something of that size through dial-up. You may be better off putting the file onto a free website and sending the person the link so they can download it. That might work better although I'm not sure that I ever uploaded anything terribly big on dial-up so I don't know how it would go.

As for making the scans smaller, fiddle around with resolution settings and sizes and whatever else you can find and just experiment to see what settings will give you sufficient quality at the smallest possible file size. You can also use a picture program to reduce the file size before trying to send it. I find Irfanview does quite a good job of dropping the size without much difference to the quality. Is it possible to type the writing instead of scanning it? You would end up with a much smaller file size, even using Word instead of straight into the email or NotePad. Most Word files are only around 30-60kb.

I don't think that the computer speed is a very big factor in sending large emails but it's been a while since I've been on dial-up and not known how to keep the computer running so I could be wrong there.

Well, let's see how you go with that and hopefully someone else will have some help for you.