Error number 0x800ccc0d in Outlook Express

[Adnams Drinker]

One of our staff who normally works at home has been trying to work in the office this morning on her Vaio laptop. We hooked it up to our network and can get internet access on it no problem.

The problem crops up when she tries to receive mail to her Tiscali mailbox using Outlook Express as she would when using her laptop at home. We get an error like the following:

The host 'pop.tiscali.co.uk' could not be found. Please verify that you have entered server name correctly. Account:'yourname', Server 'pop.tiscali.co.uk; protocol: POP3, Port:110'Secure(SSL):No, Socket Error:11001,Error Number 0x800CCC0D.

I've Google'd this error and a lot of the results said that the problem can normally be worked around by disabling anti-virus and firewalls. Her laptop is running a Panda internet security package, so we disabled this and temporarily disconnected our hardware firewall. Neither made any difference.

I found a page on the Tiscali support site that refers to this particular error. They also suggest trying to connect to their mailserver via Telnet, so I opened a command prompt and typed:

telnet pop.tiscali.co.uk 110

and pressed return in accordance with those instructions. I then got an error message saying:

Unable to connect to pop.tiscali.co.uk on port 110

Her own firewall is turned off (including XP's built-in one) and our hardware firewall is disconnected altogether, so how could that be explained? As far as I knew, if Internet Explorer was able to connect and browse pages - which it is - Outlook Express would use the same connection settings to contact the required mailservers.

Driving us mental, it is ...

 

[HomerJ]

Can she ping the Tiscali POP servers ?

Have you tried setting up a different mail account to see if it is just a problem accessing the Tiscali mail server or any mail server ?

If you can get mail in Outlook Express from another account then remove the Tiscali account and remake it as I have had mail accounts seem fine before and when you delete the account and remake it with the same settings it then works. If her account is a normal POP3 and she is not set to leave mail on the server if you delet the mail account it will not affect any email on her system or mail waiting to download

 

[Adnams Drinker]

Just opened a command prompt on our proxy/gateway PC and typed:

ping pop.tiscali.co.uk

and the request times out. Assuming I've done that correctly, it would then appear that the problem lies with our ADSL connection. That is mighty confusing as I'm assured by our network guy that the hardware firewall has been temporarily disabled while we're trying to find a way round this.

She also has a Virgin email account on the laptop and that exhibits the same error - we were more concerned with the Tiscali one for the timebeing because of the two it's the one she uses most regularly.