Terminally Incoherent

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 0×8004210A. 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:

1. Idiot Check - all the server settings were correct
2. Check the software firewall - turning it off didn’t help
3. Disable the AV email scanning - no effect
4. Start in safe mode - same problem
5. 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.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 7:27 pm and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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