The latest version of Microsoft Outlook 2002 from Office XP has a bug that makes it incompatible with our email servers. Unlike previous versions of Outlook, the software connects to the server to download mail, disconnects, and then reconnects to remove the mail from the server. This new method conflicts with the two-minute minimum time limit we have on our servers. The long-standing two-minute time limit continues to improve overall performance of our email servers by preventing abuse of the system. While it is not possible to override this bug in Outlook, a couple of alternatives are available. First, we recommend using an earlier version of Outlook, another email client such as Eudora, or using our new WebMail service, https://webmail.psu.edu/. Second, one may disable the setting that removes mail from the server. One may then use the WebMail service periodically to strip the old mail off the server.
We are working with Microsoft to fix this problem.