Anyone know why emails freeze?
 

This has happend twice to me in the past 6 months.

I check my mail, it reads "1 incomming message" and then the PC freezes to the point of no return. Cant even ctl alt del to close the program. I have to maually shut down.

I have 2 PC's and a laptop. All three machines have the efect with that particular email.

I know its not a virus, it was a Paypal email. My host was able to see where it was from. They then deleted the email, and eveything is fine.

Paypal has since sent me a new email, and it worked fine.

Whats up with that?

I've had that happen also a couple times.

What did you do to correct it? Just deleted it from your server?

no techies out today?

Ok, no techies yesturday, how about today? Anyone know why this would happen?

thXXX

I am not a big techie but I have a feeling that the email contains some flash or some other crap and your pc dosen't have a driver or whatever to run it.

that is why your machine hangs, it is looking for the driver or whatever program to run it.

That makes sence, however, it was a Paypal email. Once I deleted the bad email from my server Paypal sent me another one. The second one came in just fine.


edit- all 3 of my machine were reacting the same

My guess would be a malformed header caused by some subtle bug (subtle in that it causes an occasional hiccup) in the CGI program generating the e-mail. The header would be good enough to route to your inbox but causes your client to choke whenever it tries to retreive it.

I'd be awfully surprised if this was Outlook. It can handle most malformed headers just fine. And if it's completely freezing Windows, then something is drastically wrong. Chances are Outlook is somehow consuming all the CPU which is rather unusual.

I'd have to have a look at the actual email and replicate the problem before I could diagnose it. Are you certain the email was from PayPal (and not someone imitating them)? There have been a few vulnerabilities around lately that are able to crash Outlook and maybe even DoS the box running it.

Considering the machines were all the same, there are only a couple of constants. The server you're retrieving the mail from and the mail itself. If it definitely was from PayPal then the chances are the email was fine. What was the mailserver running?

Need more details to really get any more information. Could be a range of things.