message locks up outlook

[Heidi]

We have win 2000 and our email is configured through the
LAN. A person here sent an email with picture attachments
to a hotmail box. It's obviously too large because now
we're getting a "undeliverable mail" message. This message
locks up outlook and never completes. I am not able to
even get into outlook to stop the transmission. Any
suggestions?

Thanks in advance,

Heidi

[Lee H]

You didn't say which version of Outlook client you are using. I'm using
Outlook 2002 and the below reflects how I might try to set it up so it only
downloads the headers of email sitting in my POP/Exchange server's mailbox
(rather than trying to also download the contents of the mail - which might
be what is hanging your Outlook client).

Under the "Tools -> Options" menu, Mail Setup tab, Send/Receive button (also
reachable using "Tools -> Send/Receive Settings -> Define Send/Receive
Groups" menu), highlight the group and click Edit. Check the radio box to
only "Download item description only". This should only download the
headers for the email (date, from, to, cc, etc.) and not their content. In
prior versions of Outlook, there may be an open to download only the
headers. Close the Preview Pane for you Inbox. Close Outlook and restart.
Your Inbox should now just be a list (i.e., the Preview Pane is off). You
should now be able to do a Send/Receive and just get the headers for the
emails still sitting in your server's mailbox. Right-click on the one you
want to delete and Delete it. I believe even if you leave the Preview Pane
open in your Inbox, when you select a new email you will see a yellow banner
across the top of the Preview Pane showing the email hasn't been downloaded
yet.

Setting Outlook to only download the headers is a great way of not having to
waste the bandwidth and time to download the contents of highly graphic
usually HTML-formatted spam. You can tell if the subject is for spam, or
pretends to be a friend, or uses a vague subject, plus you can see the From
field. You can then highlight the spam, even with the Preview Pane open,
without bothering to download it. The downside is convenience. For emails
that you want to read their content, you'll have to double-click on them and
select "Mark to download this message", then use the "Tools ->
Send/Receive -> Work with Headers" menu to actually retrieve their contents
to read them (or you can simply customize the toolbar to put this menu as a
button right next to the "Send/Receive" button to make it easy). You end up
with an Inbox containing only header info for each email pending on your
mail server and you only have to download and read the ones you want. Just
turning off the Preview Pane doesn't stop wasting the time to download all
that spam. Downloading just the headers does but then you have to take that
extra step to actually download the content of the ones you want to read.

Or you could just call your Exchange or POP admin and have them delete the
email with the matching subject line from your mailbox.

[Lee H]

Forgot to mention in OL2002 when editing the Send/Receive settings for a
group, you could leave it using the default setup of downloading the headers
AND content but also restrict the size of the downloaded content. That is,
you can set it up to download the emails (with content) unless they exceed
some size (50K is the default). That way, if someone sends you a big
attachment on an email, you don't have to bother to wait until it finally
downloads before you can read that email (or any others, for that matter).