I had a user on a Windows 7 system contact me today to report that he was unable to check email from his system, but others at his location were not experiencing problems. He was able to get to websites with his browser, so there didn't appear to be an issue with Internet access. He told me that Outlook was displaying a 0x800ccc0f error message, but he didn't know what version of Outlook was present on his system, so I had him check in Outlook by going to Help then About Microsoft Office Outlook. He reported the version number was 14.0. I had to look up the version name corresponding to that number. The name to version number correlation is shown below:
| Version Name | Version Number |
|---|---|
| Outlook 97 | 8.0 |
| Outlook 98 | 8.5 |
| Outlook 2000 | 9.0 |
| Outlook XP/2002 | 10.0 |
| Outlook 2003 | 11.0 |
| Outlook 2007 | 12.0 |
| Outlook 2010 | 14.0 |
| Outlook 2013 | 15.0 |
So that version corresponded to Outlook 2013. With the version number,
I was able to provide instructions on how to determine what
POP3 server
was handling his email. It was pop3.firespring.com, so I had him run
a traceroute to it, i.e., tracert pop3.firespring.com. He
told me that was not completing successfully and some of the lines had values
of over 100 ms for the time for a response from the system at that particular
hop, so I at first thought there might be a congestin issue with the network
path to the mail server. If other systems on the same
LAN weren't experiencing the
problem, then perhaps his system was more sensitive to delays, perhaps with
a lower timeout value. But when I tried a traceroute from a Mac system, I
saw the same traceroute issue, but a telnet connection to the POP3 mail
server on the POP3 port, port 110, i.e., telnet pop3.firespring.com 110
resulted in an immediate OK response from the server
which seemed to rule out that hypothesis. So I suggested he contact his
mail service provider which found that he had an unusually large message
on the server. When that message was deleted from the server by the email
server provider his problem went away; apparently Outlook on his system
was timing out when it couldn't download that message in a reasonable
amount of time and then displaying the 0x800ccc0f error message.
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