Error 10053 means that an established connection has been dropped.

There are three descriptions of this error message we know about, but the descriptions are given by Windows, so they may vary depending on your version of Windows:

• An established connection was aborted by the software in your host machine.
• The TCP/IP Connection was aborted by Windows. This was possibly due to a data transmission timeout or protocol error.
• The virtual circuit was terminated due to a time-out or other failure. The application should close the socket as it is no longer usable.

In the first of these, the 'software in your host machine' that is referred to is actually 'Winsock' - the TCP/IP component of Windows, not VPOP3. The 'protocol error' referred to in the second text is the TCP protocol, not POP3 or SMTP, etc protocol.

10053 errors are actually quite rare usually, but there are a couple of cases we know of which can cause them:

• if the 10053 error is being reported by your email client or by VPOP3 when downloading and/or sending email, it could be a problem with your antivirus software. Both McAfee VirusScan 8 and Norton Antivirus 2004 have been found to give these errors sometimes, but other virus scanners or versions may also cause these errors. See below for more information.

• if the 10053 error is reported in the VPOP3 Status Monitor program, then this usually means that the VPOP3 server has stopped for some reason. It may be that it was stopped by someone else, or it may have failed with an application error.

• some early releases of version 2 of vPOP3 use the recycle bin quite extensively. Windows is sometimes unable to deal with these requests and this can result in 10053 errors. To eliminate this as a possible cause of 10053 errors, ensure you are running at least version 2.5.0b of vPOP3.