Outlook stops sending/receiving emails

Discussion forum for Enterprise Edition.
scotty562
Posts: 23
Joined: Tue Sep 11, 2018 12:20 pm

Outlook stops sending/receiving emails

Post by scotty562 »

I've contacted support (Request ID: 86619) and they were unable to help me so hopefully the rest of the community has seen this issue. Maybe support would be willing to open the ticket back up? We've spent $80 that got us no resolution.

A clients Outlook will work fine for days/weeks until one day it just stops sending/receiving emails. The user has to close their Outlook client and then open it back up. This happens with various versions of Outlook. I've not seen it happen with any other email client that I'm aware of.

Support looked at the Outlook logs and said the following. "There is nothing in the Outlook client log files that indicate any problems on the server. The client is issuing fetches for each message and the server is responding correctly. There are large amounts in the mailbox which are just taking time to download." This was not helpful. I have roughly 30 users with Outlook and this issue happens maybe once or twice per month and rarely to the same user twice.

Given its difficult nature to troubleshoot, I'm not sure where to go from here. Looking for advice.

MailEnable-Ian
Site Admin
Posts: 9738
Joined: Mon Mar 22, 2004 4:44 am
Location: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Re: Outlook stops sending/receiving emails

Post by MailEnable-Ian »

Hi,

Please reply to your open ticket so we can respond to that.
Regards,

Ian Margarone
MailEnable Support

scotty562
Posts: 23
Joined: Tue Sep 11, 2018 12:20 pm

Re: Outlook stops sending/receiving emails

Post by scotty562 »

Ian, the ticket is closed. I don't have any way to open it back up on my side.

MailEnable-Ian
Site Admin
Posts: 9738
Joined: Mon Mar 22, 2004 4:44 am
Location: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Re: Outlook stops sending/receiving emails

Post by MailEnable-Ian »

Hi,

What was the ticket number?
Regards,

Ian Margarone
MailEnable Support

dogukan
Posts: 1
Joined: Sun Jun 27, 2021 9:02 am

Re: Outlook stops sending/receiving emails

Post by dogukan »

Hello,

Did you find any solution about this problem? We observed the same problem on different computers which have windows 10 and office 2019 Outlook. We have to close and reopen Outlook in order to receive new emails. We observed this issue after updating to Mailenable Professional 10.33 , we updated to 10.34 but nothing changed. We really need an urgent solution about this issue.

dcol
Posts: 237
Joined: Fri May 26, 2017 11:25 pm

Re: Outlook stops sending/receiving emails

Post by dcol »

I have also seen this issue with some Outlook clients. Send/Receive just hangs. I have switched those users from IMAP to MAPI and haven't seen that issue since. MailEnable with IMAP has always been flaky.

Also seen Outlook IMAP removing some email from the inbox after read. Just disappears.

steveDD
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Aug 25, 2021 8:53 pm

Re: Outlook stops sending/receiving emails

Post by steveDD »

I have been seeing this on and off for months now across various versions of Enterprise. We're currently on 10.34 and I have some users who have Outlook stop sending/receiving unless they close the application and re-open it. This particular user has about a 7GB mailbox with about 7000+ items in the Inbox. I am not sure if his index.html is just too large and taking forever to update/append with changes, or what. But it's very frustrating because the only temporary fix is to delete his profile and make another one, and have it resynchronize everything which takes hours to do. Webmail is not as functional as Outlook so that's only a bandaid solution. I'd really like to know the best way to resolve this issue permanently.

dcol
Posts: 237
Joined: Fri May 26, 2017 11:25 pm

Re: Outlook stops sending/receiving emails

Post by dcol »

This is an issue my users have been complaining about for quite a while. My only solution now is to move users off Outlook, and they DO NOT like it. I even placed support tickets in the past about this and there is no resolution except change email server software.

dedicate-it.net
Posts: 46
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2021 8:30 pm

Re: Outlook stops sending/receiving emails

Post by dedicate-it.net »

I run two different mail servers -- one now runs SM, the other runs MailEnable -- on BOTH, we have disabled "IDLE" support because Outlook has issues with it. I am someone who had ALL KINDS OF CONTINUOUS ISSUES with Outlook and MailEnable since Office 2013 years. Mailbox size is irrelevant to the issue. I've had it with mailboxes with 100 emails and 10000... On our SM server, this issue also presents, but it's much rarer.

I'm going to test turning on IDLE support on both servers (one by one) and do some testing on resource usage and whether or not the syncing issues go away.

FWIW, on my end - when Outlook gets stuck, most of the time, you go to exit Outlook and the task needs to be force-killed.

Multiple remedies for this including the "Fast Shutdown" reg. key have not resolved it - it's random.

-- and ME's IMAP service has been a disaster since sometime around v10.37(ish)...

I think it's time to move the rest of the codebase out of VB6 and .NET2 and into something more up to date where y'all can find developers to get progress moving forward again...

dcol
Posts: 237
Joined: Fri May 26, 2017 11:25 pm

Re: Outlook stops sending/receiving emails

Post by dcol »

Do you set the IDLE timeout to zero? I have it set to 28800 now.
I agree that 10.36+ is worse.
I previously used SM and had too many issues with the company.

dedicate-it.net
Posts: 46
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2021 8:30 pm

Re: Outlook stops sending/receiving emails

Post by dedicate-it.net »

We've completely had IDLE disabled for YEARS due to all the dire warnings about resource consumption because Outlook's IMAP implementation is very poor - and it's IMAP IDLE is even worse. That said, I think that value has been ignored in our configuration since it's been disabled overall. Are you saying you have IDLE support enabled and are still experiencing the issue - because if so, then that basically voids out my experiemnt :lol:

With SM, we've been very satisfied with the product itself. Since we tend to handle 99% of our issues in-house (unless we can fully point it to a software issue we can't resolve), we don't interact much with them on the company level. The current release is dealing with some growing pains because it's a major upgrade - but overall it's performance and reliability has trounced ME with the same hardware configuration and usage.

The only reason I even brought them into this particular equation was because we actually have both softwares in production, and I've seen the Outlook issue on both servers, although our ME server does it a LOT MORE often. That's why I thought about taking a few hours one day and doing some testing since I had both platforms available and the problem persists on both - maybe we can finally point the finger at Outlook/IMAP once and for all (or find a solution).

dcol
Posts: 237
Joined: Fri May 26, 2017 11:25 pm

Re: Outlook stops sending/receiving emails

Post by dcol »

Thanks for the response.
I even tried switching to MAPI and that just quits randomly. Don't use that anymore.
Brought the IDLE timeout down to 3600 to see if there is any difference.
This only happens with large mailbox users. But it seems to have been worse in the last year or so.
The users that switched to TB client have not had any issues. But those users complain about their Outlook calendar not being available.
The real issue is when new users get hired, they all seem to know Outlook and are disappointed when they are asked to switch to a new client.

Lets face it, Outlook is the standard out there. Too bad it runs like crap on ME. Maybe the answer is moving to Exchange Server and I would have except it is too expensive. Feel free to chime in ME support. LOL

dedicate-it.net
Posts: 46
Joined: Mon Feb 22, 2021 8:30 pm

Re: Outlook stops sending/receiving emails

Post by dedicate-it.net »

"the last year or so" coincides a lot with the rise in instability in the IMAP service and the MEMIS indexing service in general.

Do these users who have large mailboxes cause huge CPU and disk activity spikes on your server "randomly"? We had a couple users who had massive mailboxes - like 60 gig - who never had a problem. Then one day I had a user with 800 meg who was basically bringing down my entire server because something was wrong somewhere in her mailbox and just her opening it in Outlook would cause a CPU-DISK-MEMORY exhaustion - to the tune of 12+gigs for the IMAP process when it would normal usage wouldn't even break 1/2 a gig (300 accounts - 700gig of mail data).

We eventually had to create a whole new mailbox for her - copied over all the messages and indices, she logged in and everything was fine. That's the kind of instability we've seen show up over the last two years... FWIW - in this example - she had been using the same version of Outlook for just shy of a decade without issue (Outlook 2013) - the client never changed - but the server sure did.

At this point, our ME installation is nothing more than a glorified gateway server that honeypots all the login abuse - we use the logs from both servers to manage our firewall rules on our SM install.

dcol
Posts: 237
Joined: Fri May 26, 2017 11:25 pm

Re: Outlook stops sending/receiving emails

Post by dcol »

None of my users are over 100GB. But I have seen a corrupt email freeze the users Outlook.
There is plenty of disk and CPU available.
Not every user has this problem, but I think most are now using webmail because Outlook is too unstable.
It has come down to ME being a webmail app only.

I would like to know, if anyone is reading this, if there is better email server software that don't cost a fortune. SM is out.

Skandiacloud Hosting
Posts: 69
Joined: Fri Nov 15, 2019 9:03 pm

Re: Outlook stops sending/receiving emails

Post by Skandiacloud Hosting »

We changed from ME to SM. Best move yet. Issues still persist but the support is much quicker since Ian left.

Post Reply