Account Properties change themselves! (Outlook 2000)

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I use OL 2000 at home to access a POP 3 account. In the tools/account/properties box under server (I think – I’m in the office now and exchange version doesn’t have those tabs) are the places for Incoming and Outgoing server addresses. In my case, incoming mail is “Postoffice.ISPNAME.net”. Further down the page is my user name and password. All works well for a while then suddenly I try to retrieve messages and nothing happens. I get a timeout error. If I look at the server tab in properties I find the incoming server has changed to “Localhost” and my user name has been modified to “USERNAME/Postoffice.ISPNAME.net”. If I set it back to the original, all works fine again, then a few months later the same thing happens.

Have I got a ghost in the machine, is this some malicious hacking from a web site, or just another Microsoft “feature”?

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You have either an antivirus or spam scanner that is proxying your POP3 account access.

Or, to put that in English, these programs intercept your requests for mail and pass them to the server, scan the results, and return the mail to Outlook, either without the offending messages, or with notations (such as SPAM in the subject line). If your mail scanner goes offline (removed from startup or crashed), your mail request will time out.

Common antivirus mail scanners are Norton, McAfee, and PC-Cillin. The only spam scanning proxy I’m familiar with is SAProxy.

Does any of this jibe with what’s on your computer?

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Jefferson – Yes, I have PC-Cillin, which has just recently started doing goofy things on start-up (looking for files on a non-existant drive – but that’s another problem that’s unrelated to this board). Previously, when it was loading correctly, I was getting a banner flash from PC-Cillin when I started downloading mail. It all becomes clear now. Next problem – fix PC-Cillin!

Many thanks. Go Sharks (again).

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