alter the timeout for how long outlook looks for a content-server on an HTML-email?

[zdoe]

no - this is not about timeouts when contacting mail servers.

instead, here's the scenario - you have a beautiful, richly-formatted and image-containing HTML email in your inbox that's trying to pull part of its content from a web-server somewhere...

BUT: for whatever reason that server is unreacheable. this results in the whole program locking up for a LONG TIME, where nothing can be done. i didn't time it exactly, but i guess 2 or 3 minutes before OL stops trying and let's you continue. and if you have preview enabled this 2-3 minutes happens every time you scroll through that message in your inbox.

wouldn't it be neat if we could tell outlook to only try 5 or 10 seconds before giving up?

 

[Diane Poremsky]

It should be 2 minutes. if it's a bad url you can use a hosts file that points to your local machine, but that doesn't really help much - it still needs to look for it.

 

[zdoe]

yups. hosts is not really an option - we don't know where the faulting email is gon' come next from, and we also don't want to prevent viewing the website of said sender sometime in the future when his/her server is back up.

so this 2 mins is hard-coded somewhere - not adjustible by some hack?

 

[Diane Poremsky]

It's a network timeout - it might be configurable, but would affect all network traffic, not just outlook.

 

[zdoe]

i'd be happy to experiment with that if i knew where that might be settable.

would it be this one:
http://serverfault.com/questions/430535/windows-7-default-tcp-connect-timeout

but neither one of the parameters

TcpMaxDataRetransmissions
TCPInitialRtt

are in my registry.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

if the key doesn't exist, it should use the default - try adding the keys / values and reboot - see if it works.