WARNING: If you can't send or receive emails:
This almost always because your ISP is down. This means it is shut down
temporarily in order to fix a fault.
Don't fiddle with your email settings, wait and an hour or two.
Sometimes it takes a whole day for the ISP to sort themselves out.
The following remedies deal with the extremely rare occasions when it is not
an ISP fault.
In case of trouble
you may need to re-configure your email account from scratch. Click
Here
to see how to do this.
Email problems with broadband:
If you cannot send or receive emails your anti-virus program may be set to
scan emails using a dial-up setting. You need to tell it to use the
broadband setting. For instance, AVG must be set to use the LAN or broadband
setting. Double click the AVG icon on the Desktop. Click
Control Center, Click
Email Scanner
(you may have to move down using the arrow key). Click the
Properties
button, then click the next
Properties
button. Click
Edit
and select the appropriate method, this is usually LAN for broadband.
UNABLE TO RECEIVE EMAILS
If you cannot receive or send emails, try removing all the phones
and filters from the wall sockets then see if the emails work. If that cures
the problem, then reconnect each phone/filter one-at-a-time to see which
phone/filter is causing the problem. Get a new filter for that phone and see
if it fixes the problem.
Unable to receive emails?
But you are able to to send emails. it may be that some inconsiderate person
has sent you an enormous photograph (say 3.5MB) which could take about 20
minutes to download using a dial-up connection. In
Outlook Express
you can restrict incoming emails so that big ones are blocked. Tell the
computer not to download anything over a certain size as follows:-
Open
Outlook Express, click
Tools, click
Message Rules-->
Mail-->New
In the top pane scroll down to find and tick the box labelled
Where the message size is more than size.
In the 2nd pane, scroll down to the box labelled
Do not download it from server
and tick it.
In the 3rd pane click the
blue underlined word, A dialogue box will pop up. In the top field
type the figure 500 and click
OK, then click the next
OK,
Now any email over 500Kb (Kilobytes) will never be downloaded, and your
incoming flow of emails will be un-blocked. A typical email with an
attachment would rarely exceed 5Kb. If you need to download a bigger file
you could safely increase the figure to about 500Kb which would take about
2.5 minutes to download. Be considerate when you send a photograph by email,
crop it and compress it (click
Here
to see how to compress a picture for sending by email).
Server unable to download emails.
On rare occasions an email may be corrupted at the ISP end of the process.
An error message pops up usually containing the code 0x800CC93. Note the
date and time of the last email you were able to receive. Then access the
ISP's website and log in to your webmail account. Look for the message that
has a date and time just after the one you noted. Delete that message.
Emails print in huge font:
The header of the printed email is normal size but the body of the emails
is not. To cure this, close Outlook Express and open up Internet Explorer.
Click View-->Text Size
and choose
Medium, Close down Internet Explorer and try printing that email
again.
Email font too small:
First make sure the Internet Explorer settings are set to Medium as in the
previous paragraph. Now open Outlook Express and click
Tools-->Options
and click the
Compose
tab. On the right of the
top
field you will see a button labelled
Font Settings.
Click it and set the font to
Arial, Regular
and
11
point,
Click
Apply
then click
OK.
Try this website
for email trouble shooting tips and email tutorials:
www.steve.maurer.net
Emails in wrong date order:
Open Outlook Express. Click the Received title once (or more times if
necessary).
If you have problems sending or receiving
emails or difficulty accessing your ISP, you may have been hijacked. Try
accessing the Internet, if your home page has changed to an unfamiliar page,
then you really have been hijacked. To solve this problem click
Here,
Vanished email:
So you just typed an email and it suddenly vanished, or it popped into the
Drafts
folder. This is common on a laptop because you can accidentally brush
against the touch pad. If the email vanished completely, you will probably
find it minimised on the task bar at the bottom of the screen; just click
it. If it is in the
Drafts
folder, click the
Drafts
folder and then open the email. Click
Send
and it will go into the
Outbox,
UNABLE TO SEND EMAILS
Can't send emails but you can receive emails
(1):
If you see an error message saying 'An unknown error has occurred...
blacklisted
file extension detected
'. It means you are trying to send an email containing an illegal
attachment. The Server has rejected it with a Response 550.
In
Outlook Express, click on the
Outbox
and either delete the email with the attachment or drag it across and drop
it on the
Drafts
folder to be dealt with later. Your other emails will no longer be blocked
by the offending email. ISP's are very careful not to allow illegal
attachments to be circulated. An illegal attachment might be one with the
suffix ',
lnk' which could be used to spread a virus.
Can't send emails (2):
If you see an error message saying 'An unknown error has occurred...' and
the email has been rejected by the server with response 550, something in
the email or its attachment cannot be accepted by the server. Follow the
same procedure as above to remove the email from the
Outbox
so that you can send other your emails.
Can't send emails (3):
If an error message indicates that there is an
smtp authentication
fault, try this In
Outlook Express,
click
Tools-->Accounts, Click your account so that it turns blue. Click
the
Properties
button. Click the
Servers
tab. In the bottom section of the window tick the box labelled
My Server requires authentication,
Can't send emails (4):
Server unexpectedly terminated and error message 451. An email you are
trying to send is disliked by your ISP. In
Outlook Express, click on the
Outbox
and either delete the email with the attachment or drag it across and drop
it on the
Drafts
folder to be dealt with later. This error is usually due to an email with
bare line feeds. See
http://pobox.com/~djb/docs/smtplf.html
Keep receiving the same emails?
This means there is a corrupted email on the server which is not allowing
the download cycle to finish.
Does your email provider offer web mail access? If yes, then view the emails
on the server, then delete the message that looks like the corrupt one. If
you don't have webmail access, try using
http://mail2web.com
If that does not cure the problem. Do this: In Outlook Express, click
Tools
->
Accounts, Click on the
Mail
tab and select your account. Click on
Properties
and click on the
Advanced
tab. Un-tick the box labelled Leave messages on the server...
Email photo resizing vanished?
The pop-up re-sizer dialog box fails to show up when you want to compress a
photo for emailing. This can happen for one of two reasons:-
(1)
Most frequently this is due to loading a new photo editing program that has
changed the file association for photos. To correct this, click
Start-->Run
then type
regsvr shimgvw.dll
and click
OK, Note the single space after regsvr. To make the change
effective you must then
Restart
the computer,
Start-->Turn off computer-->Restart.
(2)
The vital Windows file
sendmail.dll
may have been corrupted due to a power cut or due to switching off the
computer incorrectly. To repair the file, double click
My Computer
on the
Desktop
(or single click it in the
Start
menu). Then double click the main hard disk (usually Local disk C:). Double
click the
Windows
folder. Scroll down and double click the
System32
folder. For safety's sake you should now put the corrupt file in a safe
place; create a new folder called
Old files.
Click
File
in the top menu bar and click
New
then
Folder, Type the new folder name and press
Enter, Drag and drop the corrupt
sendmail.dll
file into the
Old File
folder.
Windows will replace the missing file and you should now see the re-sizing
dialog box when you want to send a photo by email.
