Outlook fails to send or receive emails associated with a POP3 email account with SEP SBE installed.

Products

• Symantec Products

Issue/Introduction

Microsoft Outlook will periodically fail when sending or receiving emails to and from POP3 mail accounts with Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition (SEP SBE) installed, and will display a timeout error. Rebooting will typically clear the issue up on a temporary basis.

Outlook will show an error message attempting to send or receive mail. The actual error message may very, but will usually reference a time out. Example error messages include:

"The operation timed out waiting for a response from the receiving (POP) server," or "A time-out occurred while communicating with the server."

Cause

This issue can be caused because Auto-Protect (real time) scanning is accessing an Outlook-related file while sending and receiving email.

Resolution

The recommended solution from Symantec development when this issue is encountered is to exclude PST and LOG files from real time scanning.

For information on how to create custom exclusions in SEP SBE, refer to the following article:
http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH214005