If your email program (Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, or similar) freezes or stops responding when it tries to download new messages, the cause is often a malformed message combined with antivirus (virus filter) software that cannot process it. This article explains how to recover.
Why the email program freezes
Some antivirus programs, such as Norton Antivirus, cannot handle broken (incorrectly formatted) email messages. When the program tries to scan such a message during download, it can hang the entire mail client.
Remove the broken message via your mail client
Follow these steps to download and delete the problem message:
- Temporarily disable email scanning in your antivirus software.
- Open your mail program and let it download the messages, including the broken one.
- Delete the broken message and empty the Trash (or Deleted Items) folder.
- Re-enable email scanning in your antivirus software.
Remove the broken message via the webmail
As an alternative, you can delete the broken message directly on the server using the Loopia webmail, which is not affected by your local antivirus software:
- Log in to the Loopia webmail with your email address and password.
- Find the broken message in your Inbox.
- Delete the message and empty the Trash folder.
Your email program should then be able to download new messages without freezing.