Hotmail/Outlook POP server switcheroo

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Just got this email from an old friend. (He’s older than me, anyway.): Yesterday, Outlook Express could not access any of my 5 Hotmail (Outlook.com) e
[See the full post at: Hotmail/Outlook POP server switcheroo]

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@woody.   Any idea why this happens?

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I haven’t a clue.

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For the sake of not triggering another hit, could it be that the “pop3 dot live dot com” text quoted in the main topic on the home page of Askwoody website?

When you check this address (as it is actually typed in topic & comments) in the on-line version of Norton Web Safe website here, it comes up as “Untested”.

If you do the same for “smtp.live.com” as shown here, it comes up as “Norton Secured”.

Or maybe when Norton Web Safe scanned the main topic when it was at the top of the home page (by a person visiting this website and having Norton Web Safe installed?, how?, when?, why?, who knows?), it decided to look up the email address “xxxx-mail dot outlook dot com” in Norton’s phishing email address database and lo & behold there it is/was this same exact email address identified as a phishing threat.

If any of this was it, you’ll probably have to scrub/modify these entries in the main topic and also related comments.

Just thinking …

Win7 - PRO & Ultimate, x64 & x86
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That article could have been updated for any number of reasons, but the reason wasn’t the server names, since MS itself has listed those (the longer ones) for multiple years now. They’re not new.

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anonymous wrote:

That article could have been updated for any number of reasons, but the reason wasn’t the server names, since MS itself has listed those (the longer ones) for multiple years now. They’re not new.

Yes, I deliberately put the “new” in quotes as the server names were only new to my system. The fact that the article had been recently updated indicated to me that the server names “xxxx-mail.outlook.com” were correct up to a month ago. So I tried them.

But I reckon there was a glitch (or configuration error) somewhere between me – in Thailand – and California, or wherever the servers are located, so my emails got sent to the wrong server. This has happened occasionally before, but for only a few minutes and not long enough for me to bother to investigate or change server names.

Anyway, all emails are working as normal today. So thanks Microsoft (never thought I’d ever write that) for keeping the old servers going.

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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For the past few months, I have been having trouble sending emails to an msn.com email address.  I can receive the email from them, but when I reply it bounces back.  Once in a while it gets through.
I checked with my email provider via their website. (it is an edu account)
Apparently since May, emails sent to msn.com, hotmail and I forget what other email addresses were not getting through.
They were trying to resolve the problem with the vendors.
 
Update in June on their website, still a problem, still trying to resolve it with “the vendors”.
I do not have any other problem with any other emails sending or receiving.

I never thought it was an MS problem.

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You couldn’t make this blankety-blank up. (Family forum – I read the rules).

Today, they all failed again:

“Your server has unexpectedly terminated the connection. Possible causes for this include server problems, network problems, or a long period of inactivity. Account: ‘xxxxxxxx Hotmail’, Server: ‘pop3.live.com’, Protocol: POP3, Port: 995, Secure(SSL): Yes, Error Number: 0x800CCC0F” – see attached image.

So I just changed all of them back to pop-mail.outlook.com and smtp-mail.outlook.com. They all worked and 63 emails arrived. – see attached images.

Maybe I should write a macro to automatically change the server names if I get an error? “Autohotkey” can do it, I’m sure.

Anyone got access to the blankety-blanks at Microsoft to find out what they are playing at?

– Roger

 

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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Nobody should be surprised that Microsoft services have DNS or availability issues every now and then… it’s all hosted in Azure Web hosting driven by man-made AI (so.. no intelligence at all). Anyway, this kind of issues happen and the best thing is to just wait until the ‘smart folks’ at Microsoft got security certficates, routing, and DNS updated/restored. As usual, they just messed up…

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It could be network issues on the internet / at your ISP. As anon above said, give it a few days and see if it behaves.

cheers, Paul

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Paul T wrote:

It could be network issues on the internet / at your ISP. As anon above said, give it a few days and see if it behaves. cheers, Paul

Just to keep everyone informed, they are all still working on (pop|smtp)-mail.outlook.com servers.

I’ll certainly report back if/when I have to change back to the old (pop3|smtp).live.com servers.

But surely there ought to be an announcement from Microsoft about this. Or did I miss it?

One issue I didn’t mention yesterday (when I got 63 emails) was that many of them were from 1 and 2 days before, i.e. were old emails resent by the servers. This was a worry in case it meant that I would always get every email sent to me since the “switcheroo” occurred, as Woody called it.

But today, fortunately, I received only new emails.

The alternative (to getting every email sent since the switcheroo) would be for me to modify each account on the servers so that the server (1) allowed applications to delete emails when accessed by POP, and (2) not keep a copy of the emails on the server when accessed by POP.

Hopefully I don’t have to do that.

– Roger

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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Getting duplicate emails implies that you are connecting to different servers –  Outlook remembers the mail IDs so it doesn’t re-download them.
Let us know how it goes.

cheers, Paul

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Paul T wrote:

Getting duplicate emails implies that you are connecting to different servers – Outlook remembers the mail IDs so it doesn’t re-download them. Let us know how it goes. cheers, Paul

OK, so it looks like getting those duplicates was a merely a glitch as I was moved (my data was moved) from one server to another.

Since that first batch of duplicates, no more have been received and the same (pop|smtp)-mail.outlook.com servers have stayed working.

“Fingers crossed” this is now stable.  🙂

 

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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Elly

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KhunRoger wrote:

“Fingers crossed” this is now stable.  

So much for crossed fingers.

It was all working fine until Tuesday (17th July). Then this:

So, again, the outlook.com servers failed. After I changed back to pop3.live.com and smtp.live.com I got my emails. I can’t remember how many were duplicates.

So that worked for two days until today, the 19th July:

So today the .live.com servers failed and I had to change back to outlook.com servers. After doing that I got 53 emails, most of which were repeats/duplicates.

This is getting really boring.

Woody, is there anyone at Microsoft you can kick for me?

 

 

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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Is your anti-virus monitoring your internet connections and stepping in?

cheers, Paul

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Paul T wrote:

Is your anti-virus monitoring your internet connections and stepping in? cheers, Paul

I’m using Avast Free A/V. I’ve already turned off one of its four “Core Shields”, as they call them. The one I turned off was the “Behaviour Shield” because it was constantly using 25% CPU power.

The other three “Shields” are called “File Shield”, “Web Shield” and “Mail Shield”.

The first scans files when opened.

The second is supposed to block “web attacks and unsafe downloads”.

The third is supposed to block “dangerous email attachments”.

But I don’t see how Avast would stop allowing connection to one pair of email servers one day and allow the other pair, and then on the next day do the complete opposite!

 

By the way, early this morning all servers failed to connect:

At 00:38, .outlook.com failed:

So at 00:42 I switched to .live.com servers, which also failed:

Just to make sure, at 00:46 I switched back to .outlook.com, but they still didn’t work:

And finally at 00:50, back to .live.com, which failed again.

I gave up for a while and and did some other stuff but had one more go at collecting mail at 01:28.

.live.com failed again so I changed to .outlook.com and that also failed.

(No images – looks like the maximum # attachments on this forum is 4)

Then today, magically, all was OK again. The .outlook.com servers worked. I received about 32 emails, no duplicates.

 

[By the way, on a totally different subject, I can now access this site (https://www.askwoody.com) even though Firefox’s Certificate Manager shows that the Certificate expired on 15th July 2018.

I couldn’t access it a couple of days ago – I got a message stating “This Connection is Untrusted” and that “askwoody.com is using an invalid security certificate”. So I added “www.askwoody.com” as a permanent exception using the Certificate Manager, but got the same “Untrusted” message even after rebooting the PC.

Now, magically, I can get through after doing nothing else with the Certificate Manager.

There’s a lot of magic going around.]

 

 

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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HiFlyer

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Hmm strange I have had my Outlook 2016 open all morning 0944MST here for about 3 hours and the Mail keeps rolling in, alas; I don’t know if this is of any help but I switched my outlook.com address to Outlook Exchange, its still outlook.com and it works fine. Could be the EU/UK servers are on the “blink” again. Wouldn’t be the first time.
https://www.howto-outlook.com/howto/outlookcommigrationinfo.htm
It could be M$ is trying to force folks off Outlook Express, it seems to me its always been around, wasn’t it part of the Win7 Essentials package? well I hope that helps a bit.

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HiFlyer

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BobbyB wrote:

Snip…

It could be M$ is trying to force folks off Outlook Express

…Snip

Yes, that had occurred to me also, but it’s a very underhand way of doing it, even for Microsoft.

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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columbia2011, HiFlyer

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@KuhnRoger #205276 “…But really, I want to know why this is happening …” “Redmondnet is scheduled to become fully aware on August 4th this year.😓👹

Redmondnet must have seen my snarky comment.  First time ever I can’t access my outlook (live) email account.  Spooky.

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BobbyB

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HiFlyer wrote:

@KuhnRoger #205276 “…But really, I want to know why this is happening …” “Redmondnet is scheduled to become fully aware on August 4th this year.😓👹 Redmondnet must have seen my snarky comment. First time ever I can’t access my outlook (live) email account. Spooky.

So time travel is real at least. I quoted HiFlyer before he actually posted. Spooky indeed.

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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BobbyB, HiFlyer

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Here we go again:

All 5 Hotmails failed:

Same errors as before:

So I changed the servers back to xxx-mail.outlook.com and they all worked:

And I got 181 emails of which all but about 12 were repeats of emails I’d already received since 22nd July, which is when I had to change FROM xxxx-mail.outlook.com TO xxx.live.com.

So it’s been working with pop3.live.com since then and now switches back to mail.outlook.com and gives me all the old emails, again.

Anyone spot a pattern here?

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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If it’s Monday, it must be “Back to pop3.live.com”-day:

All mail.outlook.com servers failed:

Same error message:

Switched back to the old pop3.live.com servers:

– and got 33 messages, all bar 6 were old and dated back to August 2nd, when the last switch occurred.

Any ideas on who to contact at Microsoft – and how?

 

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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KhunRoger wrote:

Any ideas on who to contact at Microsoft – and how?

I’m not sure if this will be of any use to you, but these articles may have something that may help?
How to Contact Outlook.com Support
Check the Outlook.com Service Status: Is Outlook.com (Live.com) Down? Here’s How to Check

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Elly

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Kirsty wrote:

KhunRoger wrote:

Any ideas on who to contact at Microsoft – and how?

I’m not sure if this will be of any use to you, but these articles may have something that may help? How to Contact Outlook.com Support Check the Outlook.com Service Status: Is Outlook.com (Live.com) Down? Here’s How to Check

Thanks for the links, Kirsty. They both point to articles written by Heinz Tschabitscher. I actually gave a link to another of his articles at LifeWire in my original post at the top of this thread – it’s the “this site” link in the second paragraph.

When the server switching first occurred at the beginning of July, I started scouring the Internet trying to find any mention of it, and found Heinz’s articles. So I sent him an email similar to the one I sent Woody. There’s been no response from Heinz even though it says in his profile page here:

“I encourage you to write me personally at heinzts@me.com with any comments, hunches, insights, problems and questions you have. I love reading readers’ messages and appreciate your writing in.”

So that’s disappointing! 🙂

Anyway, the live.com servers are currently working.

I’ll certainly keep this thread updated with any changes when they occur (not “if”) and any info as I find it.

 

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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Kirsty

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KhunRoger wrote:

I sent him an email similar to the one I sent Woody. There’s been no response from Heinz even though it says in his profile page

Are you on Facebook?

From Heinz’s bio:
“If you do not hear from me within some five days and (or or) need an answer right now, try posting to this Facebook page. “

It could be worth a further try.

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KhunRoger

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My deepest sympathies @khunroger, you really seem to be getting the old M$ run around here with your mail. If memory serves me right Outlook Express have you considered using IMAP? Its just a thought here, it maybe more stable than PO3. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/pop-imap-and-smtp-settings-for-outlook-com-d088b986-291d-42b8-9564-9c414e2aa040. A lot of blurb not really related but the Mail settings interspersed with the other M$ stuff should work. “Fingers crossed”

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KhunRoger

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Kirsty wrote:

KhunRoger wrote:

I sent him an email similar to the one I sent Woody. There’s been no response from Heinz even though it says in his profile page

Are you on Facebook? From Heinz’s bio: “If you do not hear from me within some five days and (or or) need an answer right now, try posting to this Facebook page. “ It could be worth a further try.

Thanks, Kirsty, I’m looking into that now.

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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BobbyB wrote:

My deepest sympathies @khunroger, you really seem to be getting the old M$ run around here with your mail. If memory serves me right Outlook Express have you considered using IMAP? Its just a thought here, it maybe more stable than PO3. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/pop-imap-and-smtp-settings-for-outlook-com-d088b986-291d-42b8-9564-9c414e2aa040. A lot of blurb not really related but the Mail settings interspersed with the other M$ stuff should work. “Fingers crossed”

IMAP is one of those concepts that I’ve tried to stay clear of over the years! I’m very much a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” person.

From here:

“While IMAP is generally the preferred protocol, POP3 works just fine for users who only use one machine or for some reason don’t want to keep messages on the server or in a cloud environment and prefer to have their messages permanently stored on their local computers.” – which describes me down to a T.  (I have stored emails going back to the 1990’s :). Remember those old Compuserve numbered email accounts, e.g. 100714,1122@compuserve.com).
</span></span>

I will investigate this a bit more thoroughly. My main requirement of any change to IMAP is that I don’t lose any emails.

I found a site that describes the setup of an IMAP account for Outlook – not Outlook Express – which I may try later on a little-used Hotmail account. The problem – if I am not mistaken – is that you can only ADD an account as IMAP, you can’t change an existing account to IMAP.

But, currently, .live.com servers are still working/accessible. Today.

What I really don’t understand is why there is no mention of this that I can find on the Internet. Am I really the very last XP/Outlook Express hold-out in the world?  🙂

 

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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KhunRoger wrote:

Kirsty wrote:

KhunRoger wrote:

I sent him an email similar to the one I sent Woody. There’s been no response from Heinz even though it says in his profile page

Are you on Facebook? From Heinz’s bio: “If you do not hear from me within some five days and (or or) need an answer right now, try posting to this Facebook page. “ It could be worth a further try.

Thanks, Kirsty, I’m looking into that now.

OK, I just posted this on his “About email” page:

“My question is do you know why the POP3 servers for Outlook Express keep changing from pop3.live.com and smtp.live.com to pop-mail.outlook.com and smtp-mail.outlook.com.
This change – and the reverse change back – has been happening since July 2nd. Here’s the history:
July 2nd live.com failed outlook.com working
July 3rd outlook.com failed live.com working
July 5th live.com failed outlook.com working
July 17th outlook.com failed live.com working
July 19th live.com failed outlook.com working
July 20th 00:47 outlook.com failed and live.com failed
July 20th 15:16 outlook.com working
July 23rd outlook.com failed live.com working
August 3rd live.com failed outlook.com working
August 6th outlook.com failed live.com working
Regards
Roger”

Full disclosure: I hate Facebook’s message input method. In fact, I rarely use FB. And I have no idea how he will contact me back.

 

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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columbia2011

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Update to the history:

Here’s the history:
July 2nd live.com failed…………..outlook.com working
July 3rd outlook.com failed……..live.com working
July 5th live.com failed……………outlook.com working
July 17th outlook.com failed…….live.com working
July 19th live.com failed………….outlook.com working
July 20th 00:47 outlook.com failed and live.com failed
July 20th 15:16 outlook.com working
July 23rd outlook.com failed……live.com working
August 3rd live.com failed……….outlook.com working
August 6th outlook.com failed…live.com working

Update today:
August 10th 01:00 – both live.com and outlook.com not working.

 
PS. Is there any way to use a non-proportional font here? BBCode?
– just to make it more readable.
Moderator’s reply: only Simple BBCodes, sorry

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anonymous wrote:

Update to the history: Here’s the history: <snip>

PS. Is there any way to use a non-proportional font here? BBCode? – just to make it more readable. Moderator’s reply: only Simple BBCodes, sorry

The above was me posting! (Didn’t notice I wasn’t logged in and didn’t realise you could post without logging in. Duh!)

So here is the latest “History”:
July 2nd … live.com failed…………..outlook.com working
July 3rd … outlook.com failed…..…..live.com working
July 5th … live.com failed……………outlook.com working
July 17th … outlook.com failed…..….live.com working
July 19th … live.com failed………….outlook.com working
July 20th 00:47 both outlook.com failed and live.com not working
July 20th 15:16 outlook.com working
July 23rd … outlook.com failed…..…live.com working
August 3rd … live.com failed……….outlook.com working
August 6th … outlook.com failed……live.com working
August 10th 01:00 – both live.com and outlook.com not working

Update:
August 10th 12:30 outlook.com working ~ 90 old emails from 5th August received again.

The one failure in the image above is for an account that I deliberately left using “live.com”. After changing it to use “outlook.com” it was OK.

Brain storming: Is there a chance that this could be my ISP having “problems”? (3BB – Thailand)

 

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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Summary:

July 2nd          live.com failed          outlook.com working
July 3rd          outlook.com failed       live.com working
July 5th          live.com failed          outlook.com working
July 17th         outlook.com failed       live.com working
July 19th         live.com failed          outlook.com working
July 20th 00:47   both outlook.com failed and live.com not working
July 20th 15:16   outlook.com working
July 23rd         outlook.com failed       live.com working
August 3rd        live.com failed          outlook.com working
August 6th        outlook.com failed       live.com working
August 10th 01:00 both live.com and outlook.com not working
August 10th 12:30 outlook.com working

Update:
August 10th 18:58 outlook failed           live.com working 

This evening’s screenshots:

.outlook.com servers failing:

.live.com servers working:

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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They switched again this morning.

Summary:

July 2nd          live.com failed        outlook.com working
July 3rd          outlook.com failed     live.com working
July 5th          live.com failed        outlook.com working
July 17th         outlook.com failed     live.com working
July 19th         live.com failed        outlook.com working
July 20th 00:47   both outlook.com and live.com not working
July 20th 15:16   outlook.com working
July 23rd         outlook.com failed     live.com working
August 3rd        live.com failed        outlook.com working 169 repeated emails out of 181
August 6th        outlook.com failed     live.com working     27 repeated emails out of  33
August 10th 01:00 both live.com and outlook.com not working
August 10th 12:30 outlook.com working
August 10th 18:58 outlook.com failed     live.com working 
August 11th 11:52 live.com failed        outlook.com working  13 repeated emails out of  18

This morning’s screenshots:
.live.com servers failing:

.outlook.com servers working:

Two options:

• 1. Write a Macro that automatically switches the servers in Outlook Express when there’s a server failure.
  2. Forward all emails from these Hotmail/Outlook accounts to a Gmail account.

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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And now – 15:37 : they are both not working:

Summary:

Jul  2nd       live.com failed        outlook.com working
Jul  3rd       outlook.com failed     live.com working
Jul  5th       live.com failed        outlook.com working
Jul 17th       outlook.com failed     live.com working
Jul 19th       live.com failed        outlook.com working
Jul 20th 00:47 both outlook.com and live.com not working
Jul 20th 15:16 outlook.com working
Jul 23rd       outlook.com failed     live.com working
Aug  3rd       live.com failed        outlook.com working 169 repeated emails out of 181
Aug  6th       outlook.com failed     live.com working     27 repeated emails out of  33
Aug 10th 01:00 both live.com and outlook.com not working
Aug 10th 12:30 outlook.com working
Aug 10th 18:58 outlook.com failed     live.com working 
Aug 11th 11:52 live.com failed        outlook.com working  13 repeated emails out of  18
Aug 11th 15:37 both live.com and outlook.com not working

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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Both servers stayed not working for the rest of the day.
Now, today, the .live.com servers started working:

Summary:

Jul  2nd       live.com failed        outlook.com working
Jul  3rd       outlook.com failed     live.com working
Jul  5th       live.com failed        outlook.com working
Jul 17th       outlook.com failed     live.com working
Jul 19th       live.com failed        outlook.com working
Jul 20th 00:47 both outlook.com and live.com not working
Jul 20th 15:16 outlook.com working
Jul 23rd       outlook.com failed     live.com working
Aug  3rd       live.com failed        outlook.com working 169 repeated emails out of 181
Aug  6th       outlook.com failed     live.com working     27 repeated emails out of  33
Aug 10th 01:00 both live.com and outlook.com not working
Aug 10th 12:30 outlook.com working
Aug 10th 18:58 outlook.com failed     live.com working 
Aug 11th 11:52 live.com failed        outlook.com working  13 repeated emails out of  18
Aug 11th 15:37 both live.com and outlook.com not working   
Aug 12th 13:36 live.com now working                        27 repeated emails out of  71

Today’s screen shot:

(Ignore the one error above – I made a typo in the server name. It worked OK after correction).

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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After a week of pop3.live.com and smtp.live.com working flawlessly, a new situation has arisen. Starting about 3pm on 19th August, access by Outlook Express to the first two Hotmail accounts fails, and then a minute later they work.

On 19th August at 13:12, all were working:

Then, at 15:52, access to the first two accounts failed:

But another “Send / Receive All Mail” just a minute later worked perfectly:

– and they continued to work the rest of the day.

The same happened yesterday and today. It feels like I have to wake up the servers by trying to access two accounts, and then after they’ve woken up they stay awake.

I could post screen shots from yesterday and today, but they are the same as the ones above – the first two Hotmails fail, the second two work, and then a minute later they all work and stay working.

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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Try using another service, other than your ISP, such as OpenDNS, for your DNS lookups. It could very well be that your ISP is having troubles, as others have suggested earlier in this thread.

OpenDNS’s servers are located at the following I.P. addresses: 208.67.220.220 and 208.67.222.222

You could also try using Google’s DNS server, located at 8.8.8.8 (yes, that’s four eights in a row with only a dot separating them).

If you need guidance on just how to change your source of DNS lookups to one of those mentioned above, drop a line here and we’ll get back to you with instructions.

Both of the above services are completely free for anyone to use, although OpenDNS has additional services that are paid services, but useful for many folks. Their basic DNS lookup service, however, is completely free of charge to anyone anywhere in the world.

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HiFlyer

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anonymous wrote:

Try using another service, other than your ISP, such as OpenDNS, for your DNS lookups. It could very well be that your ISP is having troubles, as others have suggested earlier in this thread.

OpenDNS’s servers are located at the following I.P. addresses: 208.67.220.220 and 208.67.222.222

You could also try using Google’s DNS server, located at 8.8.8.8 (yes, that’s four eights in a row with only a dot separating them).

If you need guidance on just how to change your source of DNS lookups to one of those mentioned above, drop a line here and we’ll get back to you with instructions.

Both of the above services are completely free for anyone to use, although OpenDNS has additional services that are paid services, but useful for many folks. Their basic DNS lookup service, however, is completely free of charge to anyone anywhere in the world.

That’s a good idea! Yes, “Paul T” suggested my ISP could be having problems. I didn’t think of it being a DNS problem though.

The DNS that I am using is Google’s – 8.8.8.8 – with the alternate being 8.8.4.4.

I will try my ISP’s DNS service as I’m sure I have read that there are many people who say there is little advantage in using 8.8.8.8 other than it is easy to remember!

If the problem continues, then at least it is a variable that we can ignore.

Today, though, all is well – the .live.com servers are accessible without problems. Touch wood.

Stay tuned – I’ll let you know what happens.

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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So far, so good:

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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Since changing to my ISPs DNS service, I haven’t had to switch from the old pop3.live.com and smtp.live.com servers to the new pop-mail.outlook.com and smtp-mail.outlook.com servers.

(I hope tomorrow I don’t have to retract that.)

However, there have been what I have previously called “glitches”, where one or more Hotmail accounts cannot be immediately accessed but a minute later they work perfectly.

These events give me a gut feeling that the servers I am trying to reach have “gone to sleep” and it takes a few attempts to “wake them up” and access my email.

The accounts that fail are always the first one(s) that my Outlook Express tries to access. When the first two accounts fail, the remaining two work fine. Repeating the “Send / Receive All” command has always resulted in all accounts working OK.

Following are images from the 4 events where there were problems collecting mail. These images were generated by a macro that I wrote that takes a screenshot of the “Tasks” tab after mail has been successfully retrieved and also takes a screenshot of the “Errors” tab when there is a problem. So all 4 of these images contain a snapshot of both tabs.

Event 1. 2018/08/23: Here, one message could not be retrieved – according to the error message – and caused two errors. After getting all mail a second time there were no problems. I have no idea what the problem was or which message had the problem. This was an odd occurrence.

Event 2. 2018/08/28: This is the usual “glitch”. The first two accounts fail and the second two work. After repeating the “Send / Receive All” command, they all work without problems:

Event 3. 2018/09/04: Another example of the above:

Event 4. 2018/09/06: The third example of the above:

If anyone has another idea of what is causing this – apart from my “sleeping server” idea – I’d love to hear it!

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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They look like network errors to me. The trouble is working out where the issue lies.
Check your network card and router for bad packets that seem to happen about the same time as the errors.
Another machine with that Outlook client on it would eliminate the PC as the culprit.

cheers, Paul

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KhunRoger

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Paul T wrote:

They look like network errors to me. The trouble is working out where the issue lies.
Check your network card and router for bad packets that seem to happen about the same time as the errors.
Another machine with that Outlook client on it would eliminate the PC as the culprit.

cheers, Paul

These errors – where initial access(es) to Hotmail accounts fail and then subsequently work – may well be due to network errors, but they are a fairly recent development (although in the past they may have happened, but very infrequently), and they are significantly different from the original problem I reported where I had to edit several Hotmail account properties to change servers in order to access my email.

So that original “server switch” problem hasn’t reoccurred since August 12th.

This new “initial access” problem is a curious irritation and requires only repeating the “Send / Receive Mail” command, which is no problem.

Having said all that, I would like to nail down where the problem is occurring, provided I don’t upset my system. With that in mind, I should say that the network hardware I use is part of my Gigabyte motherboard. I don’t have a network card in this PC or my other PC and laptops. Also, they run Windows 10 normally – I wouldn’t like to move my Outlook Express profile data to one of them even though they can also boot XP.

If you can say what utilities I should run or what logged data I can inspect – on the PC or in the router – to help identify where these errors may be occurring I would certainly like to try and report back.

FYI, yesterday there was another occurrence of the first two accounts failing and then everything working perfectly for the rest of the day.

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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If you are willing to get into some serious “tech” you could load Wireshark and capture the data when you first connect and fail. Reading through that should show where the issue lies – I promise to help.  🙂

cheers, Paul

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KhunRoger

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Paul T wrote:

If you are willing to get into some serious “tech” you could load Wireshark and capture the data when you first connect and fail. Reading through that should show where the issue lies – I promise to help.

cheers, Paul

I’ve tried 4 times to reply to your post and each time I get this:

I’ll break my reply into sections and see if I can identify the problem. It’s not as if there are any expletives in my response, although I’d really like to use a few right now!

——————————————————————————————–
Problem found:

Apparently if you type “data” followed immediately be a colon you get that WordFence error.

You try it!

Now back to my original response…

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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Paul T wrote:

If you are willing to get into some serious “tech” you could load Wireshark and capture the data when you first connect and fail. Reading through that should show where the issue lies – I promise to help.

cheers, Paul

Wow – I had forgotten all about WireShark! I just spent half an hour trying to remember what I’d used it for years ago. Hooray for “Everything Search” and “Agent Ransack”!

So I used it around August 2010 to determine how a program on my PC was able to reset my ZyXel modem. I think it was a button on the web interface page of the modem. So, after hitting the button, I captured the data to the modem and found the command. Being a hoarder, I still have the image of data –

So I then found out how to send that command from a program I wrote in “Liberty Basic”. That program was a bit naughty in that it scoured some torrent sites for UK TV programs… but I guess we shouldn’t talk about that. 😉

So when the Internet stopped working, my program would reset the modem:

The first thing I must do now is familiarise myself with WireShark again and capture some data.

I’m not sure what to look for in the captured data, but I guess the server name – pop3.live.com – would be a start and the responses to it.

I’ll let you know how I get on but if you can suggest anything else I’d appreciate it.

Thanks again for reminding me about WireShark!

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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What I have determined so far is that the IP address that my Outlook Address goes to to get my mail is 40.100.29.34. My local IP is 192.168.1.30.

I don’t know how to save the data as a plain text file, so I took a screen capture:

This data is from collecting mail from one Hotmail account. There was no mail.
So I guess I need to get the capture started, with the filter set to 40.100.29.34, every time I get all my emails and see if I can capture the failures.

…

OK, I just did that, but no errors. It would be nice if I could reduce the size of the capture file and also if I could save it as a text file so that I can extract just the salient data.

The capture file from getting all my emails a few minutes ago is 1.2 MB. There were 21 emails, so a lot of communications. If you can suggest a way of reducing the size eg. by changing the filter, that would be helpful. I really want to convert it to text though. There must be a way – I’ll investigate more.

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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The capture file is the format to use because you can load it in WS and then add more filters.
We really need the session data from a failed connection. Can you set the connections to manual, fire up WS, then run one connect?

cheers, Paul

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KhunRoger

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Paul T wrote:

The capture file is the format to use because you can load it in WS and then add more filters.
We really need the session data from a failed connection. Can you set the connections to manual, fire up WS, then run one connect?

cheers, Paul

Ah, OK, I think I get it. So the WireShark captures everything if there’s no Capture Filter, but what you see in the Capture window depends on the Display Filter(s) you apply.

So today I started WireShark capturing and did a manual “Get / Receive” mail from each of my four Hotmail accounts, one by one, hoping for a failure of one or both of the first two accounts as sometimes happens, but they all worked OK. So I’ll repeat that process until I capture a failure.

The IP address of Hotmail is now 40.100.29.210 today. Yesterday it was 40.100.29.34. I ran a “WhoIs” on the addresses and it appears that Microsoft owns every address from 40.74.0.0 to 40.125.127.255: https://rdpguard.com/free-whois.aspx?ip=40.100.29.210#

Thanks for your help with this and please let me know if there’s anything more I should be doing.

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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Setting a capture filter for the range 40.100.0.0 will only capture data to/from that range, then it’s display filtering for in depth analysis.

cheers, Paul

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Paul T wrote:

Setting a capture filter for the range 40.100.0.0 will only capture data to/from that range, then it’s display filtering for in depth analysis.

cheers, Paul

Yes, I understand how that works now! I found this help page very informative:
https://wiki.wireshark.org/DisplayFilters#Display_filter_is_not_a_capture_filter

The size of the “.pcapng” capture file is about 6 MB when I get mail from all four Hotmail accounts plus the Gmail and Yahoo accounts, so I don’t think I need to specify a capture filter to reduce its size. I deliberately stop all other Internet accesses, e.g. torrent clients and browsers, to reduce the amount of other traffic.

When I use a display filter of “ipaddr==40.100.0.0/16” I can see all the Hotmail server communications. Of course, they might change the IP address to 40.xxx, but it’s easy to spot their communications because it’s basically all that’s going on.

I’ll report back as soon as I capture a failure.

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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This morning at 6 minutes past midnight I had a situation where Hotmail could not access any of the usual four accounts that it tries. I tried again 4 minutes later and they all worked.

Most of this was captured by Wireshark – only the failure of the very first account was missed as I hadn’t started Wireshark at that time. I think it’s called S*d’s Law that the one time I didn’t start capturing that a failure occurred.

But this failure was not like the usual failures where the first two accounts fail and the second two work OK. And then, usually, they all always work for the rest of the day.

Also, this failure is not like the original subject of this topic which was the Hotmail servers switching from pop3.live.com to pop-mail.outlook.com.

After filtering the displayed data using the usual “ip.addr == 40.100.0.0/16” filter, nothing was displayed. So my Outlook Express was not trying to communicate with the usual Hotmail server IPs.

[The capture I did afterwards, when all accounts were accessed successfully, showed many communications with 40.100.54.2, which is owned by Hong Kong Microsoft.]

In the “failure” capture, the messages that usually go to 40.100.xxx.xxx appear to go instead to 104.27.212.30, which is owned by Cloudflare SF.

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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Here is a typical capture with no email to collect, filtered by the usual Hotmail address 40.100.0.0/16:

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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Does look like an anomaly. Hopefully you’ll get a real failure soon.  🙂

cheers, Paul

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At last I just captured a “normal” failure where the first two Hotmail accounts fail and the last two work OK:

So two Gmail accounts worked, then a Hotmail account failed, a Gmail worked, another Hotmail failed and then two Hotmails worked and finally a Yahoo worked.

Immediately afterwards, I repeated the “Send / Receive All” command, and they all worked OK.

I’ve been playing with Wireshark to try to spot any anomalies when there’s a failure, but all I’ve come up with so far is that when all the 8 accounts were accessed OK, there were 8 “Client Hello” messages:

When I apply the same filter to the earlier data captured when two of the Hotmails failed, I expected to see 6 “Client Hello” messages. But that’s way too logical:

So now I’m trying to find the beginning of the first Hotmail account failure (i.e. locate the end of the 9 emails received from the 2nd Gmail account) to determine where this Hotmail account went wrong. But knowing next to nothing about the protocol makes this quite a brain ache. In fact, I’ve had enough for today!

If you can suggest what I should try to find, please do. 🙂

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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Error 10065 seems to be a routing error – the client knows where to go but has no route information. The issue is probably on your PC rather than external.
Do you have any traffic monitoring / filtering software? Maybe your AV?

cheers, Paul

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KhunRoger

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Paul T wrote:

Error 10065 seems to be a routing error – the client knows where to go but has no route information. The issue is probably on your PC rather than external.
Do you have any traffic monitoring / filtering software? Maybe your AV?

cheers, Paul

Sorry for the late reply – I’ve been “playing” with WireShark and watching YouTube videos on how to use it.

But your post about Error 10065 got me thinking and I found this post about it, http://goo.gl/9kNYr7 , that suggests Peerblock was the culprit in that particular case.
I do run Peerblock with my torrent client, Vuze (formerly Azureus), and I also run “NetMeter” (http://goo.gl/pmkCi6) and NetWorx (http://goo.gl/CKMJ59) which monitor up/download speeds and traffic.

I found this post that explains that the “Host unreachable” message is an ICMP message: http://goo.gl/3jbX7Z , so I filtered the September 17th capture file – where 2 Hotmail accesses failed – by specifying ICMP protocol.

But then it got confusing. All 5 ICMP events that were listed in the top window showed the destination as my computer (192.168.1.30) and 5 different sources. But in the User Datagram Protocol window at the bottom, the source is 56789, which is my Vuze torrent client port number, and just above that the source is listed as 192.168.1.30 which is my computer.

So the top window has the source and destination opposite to what the detailed analysis of the messages show further down. I don’t know if this is a bug in WireShark or I’m not interpreting the data correctly.

Maybe I’ll post about it on a WireShark forum.

So the bad news is, these ICMP “Host Unreachable” messages are all about my Vuze client and nothing to do with Outlook Express even though OE produced “Socket Error 10065” messages and failed to collect mail from two accounts.

But the good news is, no “Error 10065” messages from Outlook Express since I’ve been getting mail and capturing without Peerblock and Vuze running.

Also, the original problem of the servers switching hasn’t occurred since August 12th.

This must be the longest AskWoody thread ever.

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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ICMP to your computer is a response from another computer, so the destination is correct – your firewall/router wouldn’t allow the packets through if they were not in response to one from your PC.

Nice bit of thinking on Peerblock, seems to be the fix.

cheers, Paul

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KhunRoger

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Paul T wrote:

ICMP to your computer is a response from another computer, so the destination is correct – your firewall/router wouldn’t allow the packets through if they were not in response to one from your PC.

Nice bit of thinking on Peerblock, seems to be the fix.

cheers, Paul

Ah! I get it now – thanks for clearing up the source/destination confusion.

I’ve just gone through all 35 capture files that I have saved and determined that all those that have ICMP messages – 5 of them – relate to port 56789, so they are all problems with Vuze and not Outlook Express.

In one capture file there were 65 ICMP messages in a 50 second period, but all were about port 56789.

So I’ll keep getting mail without Peerblock or Vuze running, and capture it all with WireShark in hope of capturing another Error 10065 event.

If that doesn’t happen in the next few weeks I think we can assume the Outlook Express Error 10065 problem was caused by Peerblock.

Of course, we still haven’t got to the bottom of the original POP server switch problem!

Stay tuned! 🙂

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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KhunRoger wrote:

If that doesn’t happen in the next few weeks I think we can assume the Outlook Express Error 10065 problem was caused by Peerblock.

Of course, we still haven’t got to the bottom of the original POP server switch problem!

Stay tuned! 🙂

Just to keep you guys up to date…

Since August 12th, the original problem of the server at “pop3.live.com” failing and me having to use the “pop-mail.outlook.com” server has not reoccurred. This problem may have been solved by switching DNS service from Google’s (8.8.8.8) to my ISP’s (110.164.252.222) which I did on August 22nd.

Since September 22nd I’ve had no intermittent problems collecting mail from “pop3.live.com”. That is when I stopped running Peerblock while collecting the mail.

I’ll update this thread if anything reoccurs.

Thanks to all for help and advice given. 🙂

Nil illigitimi carborundum

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Elly

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