Our Malaysian ISP is always having problems with international websites and they are good at blaming circuit faults. Why is only Malaysia affected? Why is only TM Net affected? Few weeks ago I can hardly even access my own blog site to do updates but now, at least I can access but downloading any files from server that is hosted out of Malaysia is terribly slow. Luckily I got a cheap hosting in Malaysia with a lot of bandwidth and I installed RapidLeech to download files for me.

Downloading email is another big headache. My wife has her own email account with own personal domain name and the email server is hosted in US. Whenever she sync or hit the Send and Receive button in Windows Live Mail or Outlook Express, she’ll definitely get the popup window that says “Your POP3 server has not responded in 60 seconds. Would you like to wait another 60 seconds for the server to respond?”
Your POP3 server has not responded in 60 seconds
Usually I’ll just ask her to click the Wait button but she’ll end up clicking the wait button many times. If she’s lucky, the download of email starts but if not, she’ll continue clicking it. Unfortunately this happens ALL THE TIME and I had to figure out a solution for her.

This email timeout problem usually happens if you have a very unstable or slow internet connection and is trying to download an email attachment that is very large in size.

First, you can configure your email client such as Outlook Express or Windows Live Mail to have longer period of server timeouts instead of the default 1 minute.

1. Click Tools from the menu bar and select Accounts.
2. Select the email account that is having the timeout problems in the list and click Properties.
3. Go to Advanced tab and drag the slider for Serer Timeouts. The highest is 5 minutes.
outlook server timeouts
4. Click OK and Close.

Now if your email client is still unable to start downloading after 5 minutes, you should check your email from webmail. You should consult your company administrator if they have a webmail access, if not, you can use Mail2Web. Before that, you will need to know your email account server’s information such as your login name, password and pop3 server. The easiest way to get all that information is by using Nirsoft’s Mail PassView. It is able to extract all email information that is saved in your email client that is installed on your computer. Do take note that an antivirus might flag Mail PassView as a threat. This is normal because this is a password recovery tool and I assure you that it is absolutely safe if you downloaded it from Nirsoft’s website.

After download, extract and run mailpv.exe. Note down the Server, Type, User and Password displayed in the list. Now go to http://www.mail2web.com and click Advanced Login once the page has finished loading. Enter the email information that you’ve noted just now and click Check Mail.

Now you should see all your emails. Go ahead and download the large attachments, then delete the email from mail2web so that it won’t timeout the next time when you sync your email using Windows Live Mail. To prevent this problem from happening in future, I’ve transferred my wife’s domain name to a Malaysia server.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,