Stamped: August 30th, 2006

Just spent half an hour trying to debug mysterious “mail server” problems on a customer’s MX server. The mail would download across the network, then mysteriously ‘disconnect’ when it finished. We tried lowering the load on the mailserver (it was quite busy, load average 1.8), various tricks. Webmail worked OK, but clearing the mailbox didn’t.

The specific error message in Outlook 2000 was something like, 51 messages couldn’t be retrieved from the server. This usually happens when the connection to the server is lost due to network problems. Contact your administrator. Download error 0×80040403.

Now, you’d think that meant there was - for example - a dropped connection, due to network problems, right?

Nope. When he finally read the incomprehensible 0×80040403 number at the end of that message, and it was duly googled, you know what? It’s nothing to do with a network issue. It’s 100% to do with the mailbox being too big.

I’m not even going to speculate on why they worded the error message so completely misleadingly. Thanks.

The punchline, I guess, is that despite some gentle suggestions that maybe Outlook 2000 isn’t the best email client in the world, the gentleman in question won’t budge: Outlook has a “nice calendar” which he uses to organise his life in. And I respect that.

And I hope that calendar is good enough to make up a day of his lost work.