POP Lock Busy...?

First step is to contact the provider. Some email accounts only have a 5 meg limit. (The provider can always delete the message from the server if need be. Next check the local machine. Sometimes ativirus software (like nortons) can wreck havoc on amachine that is getting big email.

Let's face it, after you find yourself in this exactly same situation a few times, you will know exactly what to do....

Larry Hyman

We used to have the same issue quite often when we had an external Unix server handling our email. For us it was usually that the message was too big and Outlook would choke trying to download it. A file was created on the server called username.pop in the directory that the waiting email was stored. Its normal for one of those to get created, but its supposed to get deleted after the client downloads the mail. If it fails, the file stays and their normal "inbox" never gets restored. A manual delete of the username.pop usually fixed things. At least on our system no mail was lost that way, it was all restored to the normal file (but you might want to copy it do a different name just in case).

Also, for us it was Outlook that couldn't download some attachments. I would then use Outlook Express to download them. Neither I or the ISP could ever come up with a "fix" for the problem, just the work around.

If you want to check the format of an email open them up on the server via pico or some other text editor and look in their headers. Somewhere in there you should see something like this:

Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

That will tell you what format its in. But Outlook Express should be able to download it regardless, it just might not look right.

-Heath