Sometimes Microsoft Outlook gets stuck in a loop trying to receive mail. There can be many causes of this, but often this situation is due to a bad piece of mail in the inbox on your mail server that Outlook and/or your Antivirus software just cannot process. The offending email may have a bad attachment/virus, or the email may be badly formatted in some other way.

One way to recitify this situation is to delete the offending email by closing Outlook and logging into your email inbox through a webmail front-end via your web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc).

Webmail links for popular email domains are:

  att.net
  bellsouth.net
  pacbell.net
  swbell.net
  prodigy.net
  charter.net
  comcast.net
  verizon.net
  Other

If you are having this problem, try logging into the appropriate webmail link above and clearing out the offending email. Outlook might start working for you again!