There are many occasions when your users will receive error messages when they attempt to send and receive emails via Outlook or Outlook Express.

You can start your diagnostic process by going through the error logs but oftentimes you will see the same error messages over and over again. Most problems are related to connections between the email clients and the email server(s). It could be that the email server is not available or the connection is down. Sometimes it’s just a matter of a slow network or a faulty physical connection.

I once had a situation in our office where one of our users was complaining about their connection for several days. We would run network diagnostics and troubleshoot their network transmission and receiving speeds. Some days everything would be okay but then the problem would reappear. It was only after another employee left the company that we learned through another party that the ex-employee had been routinely sabotaging the other employee’s physical LAN connection. Sometimes not fully inserting the connector into the connector opening was all it took to make it appear that there was an intermittent problem with their network. And since email was the first thing the victimized employee checked in the morning they thought it was related to the email server.

Anyway, there are other conditions where traffic to and from Outlook or Outlook Express can have errors. Sometimes it is because of recent changes to the end users account settings. The problematic changes could be caused by something as innocent as misspellings or other typo errors. Maybe a user’s profile is not correct or set up properly.

The problems may not be with the client but are instead on the email server in which case you, as the email administrator, will be hearing about email problems from all of your users.  And it sometimes happens that there are version incompatibilities between software packages installed on the email server such as anti-virus software or other security software packages.

There are of course more not so obvious situations such as installs that did not complete or configurations that are not correct. And sometimes some email software component dependencies have either been corrupted, maliciously renamed (hacked) or just plain old been blatantly removed from the server or client.

You can look on the sever side for several common error messages. Some of the most common error messages that are generated during the process of sending and receiving email messages include:

• Task ‘SMTP server name – Sending and Receiving’ reported error (0×80042109): ‘Outlook is unable to connect to your outgoing (SMTP) email server. If you continue to receive this message, contact the server administrator or Internet service provider (ISP).’
• The server could not be found. (Error Number: 0×800ccc0d)
• A time-out occurred while communicating with the server: 0×800ccc19
• Sending and Receiving task reported error (0×800ccc0f): ‘The connection to the server was interrupted. If this problem continues, contact the server administrator or Internet service provider (ISP).’ (Invalid server response)
• Your server has unexpectedly terminated the connection. Possible causes include server problems, network problems, or long periods of inactivity. Account. account name, Server: ’server name’, Protocol: POP3, Server Response: ‘+OK’, Port: 110, Secure(SSL): No, Error Number: 0×800ccc0f
• No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it.
• The operation timed out waiting for a response from the receiving (POP) server 0×8004210a

Additional error messages your users may receive include but are not limited to:
- 0×800ccc0e
- 0×8004210b
- 0×800ccc0b
- 0×800ccc79
- 0×80040900

I’ve already discussed several reasons and conditions that would cause these error messages to be generated. As an email administrator you will most likely be, or are working with, the network administrator. So most often your first step in identifying the source of the problem will be to determine if your network connection is functioning properly.

The simplest test is to just check if you can even access an external or internal web site. You might want to start by opening up a browser window and then checking to see if you can bring up some of the more common web sites such as:
www.google.com
www.microsoft.com
www.ebay.com
www.paypal.com

If you cannot access any of those sites then you have an internet connection problem and you will have to perform more network connection related diagnostics.

Once you have diagnosed and fixed your network connection problem you can then test your email server connection again by sending and receiving an email. Hopefully you will not receive anymore error messages. If, however, you still get error messages then you should review the settings on the email accounts in question.