My company has several users who were (un)lucky enough to end up with Office 2007 on their computers. Three of them were also using McAfee Security Center suite. All of them were unable to download mail from POP3 servers since around Friday. Every time they tried, they would get a timeout error 0x8004210A. Googling this message didn’t give us any results – nothing relevant to our problem at least, and none of the suggested fixes worked. Most of the possible fixes we found or could think about were:
- Idiot Check – all the server settings were correct
- Check the software firewall – turning it off didn’t help
- Disable the AV email scanning – no effect
- Start in safe mode – same problem
- Create a new Outlook profile – same problem with the new profile
None of these things restored connectivity. On each machine you could telnet to port 110 without any issues. So it definitely was not a firewall issue. We tried everything, and nothing seemed to work. Curiously enough, sending was working just fine.
What’s even stranger was that one of the affected computers was a brand new Dell which was literally taken out of the box on Thursday just before sending it to the new employee. And that said employee used it for about an hour on Friday without ever even opening Outlook.
After messing around with this shit for few hours I made the call to just remove McAfee completely from the system and see if that helps. It was either that, or b0rked MS Office installation. It turns out I was right. The culprit was the AV suite. It seems that the email proxy they use for filtering and scanning your mail got somehow broken and rendered incompatible with Outlook 2007 during the last update. I have yet to hear about any patch or update from McAfee or Microsoft. In fact I can’t see any possible resolution to this issue. In the meantime I had 3 people being unable to use Outlook for 4 days now.
My only choice at this point is to fuck McAfee and go with something else. If you get this issue, I recommend dropping McAfee at least until they figure out a fix.
[tags]mcafee security center, outlook 2007, mcafee breaks outlook 2007, security, antivirus[/tags]
AVG FTW :D
hmm… didn’t have to take my finger off of shift for any of the above
(that’s because I’m awesome)
CAPS LOCK IS CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL! :mrgreen:
Also, this.
But I agree – AVG is a good choice.
I have the same issue but i’ve uninstalled McAfee and reinstalled Outlook but still getting the error!!!
I have the same error using Outlook 2002 with Mcafee .. removing and reinstalling the email account fixed it for a couple of days ..
Still an issue. Google Outlook 2007 slow and there are hundreds of incidences. Well, at least Windows 7 works OK. I would suggest also doing an inbox fix using scanpst and then compacting the data file. If I reinstall the whole Office 2007 program, it runs fine for about two days. This is like Vista revisited.
This is a dirty behaviour. Definitely no one will anticipate it.
This happens because of the McAfee Proxy Service.
Go to Services editor (run –> services.msc) and stop McAfee Proxy Service and then ALL IS WELL