Outlook Connection Issues

[pjobrent]

Good Morning All,

We are having connection issues with Outlook 2010. We are running Windows 7 Professional 64-Bit on all computers and running Microsoft Security Essentials, the issue occurs at random times throughout the day for every user (total of 8 users), but rarely are multiple users facing the issues at the same time, so when one or 2 users can't connect everyone else can. Everything will be working fine and then all of a sudden, the send/receive error pops up and says cannot connect to server. Our mail service is hosted and I have checked with them and they have verified that if it was their issue then all the users would experience the same issue at the same time. They also have a webmail service that when I cannot connect through outlook, I can try that to check account connection, I can always connect through the webmail even if outlook says errors. I also contacted the ISP and they verified that it is nothing on their ends all of the ports we are using are wide open.

My question is what can I try to avoid the connection errors, I have tried turning off the anti-virus and Windows firewall? They said that is isn't the router because all users would have same issue at same time. It is definitely a computer based issue any ideas that I can try?

Thanks!

Brent

 

[Diane Poremsky]

It sounds like there is a block of some sort based on number of connections - that's why it works for some but not all. Low bandwidth could cause it too, but i think it would need to be pretty slow. On the other hand, Outlook is pretty talkative and the mail provider could be limiting the number of connections per IP address - I'm assuming you all use the same IP?

Does it reconnect on it's own later or go into a hung state?

 

[pjobrent]

Thanks for the reply, it does connect after awhile, normally it requires the user to force the send/receive process. Yes we all use the same IP. Is there anyway to trace the connection and look for errors or a log that reports more than the "Unable to Connect to Server" error.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

You can turn on logging in Outlook and see if what it reports as the problem -

Outlook 2007:

Tools menu, click Options.

On the Other tab, click Advanced Options.

Select the Enable logging (troubleshooting) check box, and then click OK and return to outlook.

Log files will be in %temp%\Outlook (type or paste that in the address bar of windows explorer then press enter)

The difficult part is you'll need to enable it for everyone until someone has problems. One logged incident should be enough - disable logging on all of the computers and open the log from the problem computer in notepad and see what clues it holds.