The success of Outlook can be attributed to the useful features and its integration capabilities with other MS Office apps from the suite. The presence of a significant number of features makes Outlook a dominant player in email management arena. But MS Outlook is not perfect; new bugs and errors get reported to the Microsoft community from time to time. One of the common errors that many Outlook users face is the 0x80042108 error. Due to this issue, users are unable to send or receive emails (see the snippet below).
If you are experiencing this issue, then now is the time to ask yourself- Do you have a third-party Malware scanner which has somehow (or after giving access) managed to integrate itself with Outlook? Disabling the scanner might be a better choice than leaving it ON.
Effects of Virus Scanner Integration on Outlook Mails
The following can happen if you leave the virus scanner integration ON:
- Send/receive errors.
- Lost emails.
- Duplicate emails.
- Visibility of HTML code in a message.
- Discrepancies in the font sizes.
- Mail stuck in Outbox.
- Send/receive taking relatively more extended time than anticipated.
As mentioned earlier, it might be better to turn off the virus scanner’s integration with Outlook. Want to know why? See below -
- Reading Pane The inbuilt Outlook security feature doesn’t allow the code execution when viewing your emails in the reading pane. Hence making it impossible to get infected with a virus by merely opening the mail. To get infected one has to double click the virus.
- Attachment Scanning If the inbuilt scanner finds any email attachment suspicious, then it might make the attachment inaccessible. Similarly, the on-access virus scanner (real-time scanning as you open files) will kick in and stop you from opening the file.
- No added protection from integration The on-access scanner uses the same anti-virus definitions as the inbuilt Outlook scanner. Therefore, there is no need for antivirus integration as it doesn’t add any extra layer of security.
Even after disabling the on-access virus protection, you cannot get past this error code then consider trying the following methods:
- Go to the Search tab > type cmd.
- Next, type sfc/scan in the text box and follow the instructions.
- Go to Start > Run
- Enter outlook/safe in the text box > click OK.
- Next, in the Choose Profile dialog box, choose the default profile settings, and click OK.
- This will automatically open Outlook in Safe mode. To confirm, please check the title bar.
Disabling the virus protection depends upon the tool. With most of the tools, one can disable the integration from Control Panel. Sometimes this isn’t enough as it might be present as an Add-in in Outlook. So, you can just visit the Add-ins in Options in Outlook and disable that add-in from there. Follow these steps:
- Go to File > Options in the MS Outlook.
- Now, click on Add-ins from the left panel. Click on Go against Manage COM Add-ins.
- In the COM Add-ins dialogue box, select the anti-virus application and click on Remove option.
- Next, close the dialogue boxes and the application. Restart your system finally.
If you are still unsure, then you can uninstall the virus scanner entirely and then reinstall the tool from Control Panel completely. Although, you should run a cleanup tool before reinstalling it.
If your virus scanner is not letting you disable integration with Outlook, then you should possibly dump it as you can use Microsoft Security Essential as a free alternative on Windows Vista and Windows 7. On Windows 8 and 10 there is no need to install a third-party antivirus tool as it comes preinstalled with Windows Defender.
If you have tried all of the aforementioned manual methods and unable to get past error code 0x80042108 but with no luck, it might be time to consider using a professional third-party tool for this purpose. We are not considering the manual way to repair the corrupt PST files, i.e. scanPST.exe as this application is not able to repair serverly corrupt files and also has a size limit on the file (2 GB only). So, it would be a wise decision to directly go for a perfect automated Outlook Repair tool.
One such tool is Kernel for Outlook PST Repair. This tool can easily repair corrupt, damaged PST/OST files and can also repair large sized PST files. Additionally, you can recover deleted email items in a jiffy. The users can also repair ANSI and UNICODE file format PST files. After recovery one can save files to PST to MSG, DBX, MBOX, EML, TXT, RTF, HTML, and MHTML formats. Users can directly export the recovered PST file to Microsoft 365, email servers and webmails.
Once you are done with the installation, launch the tool. The welcome screen shows a friendly user interface. One can either select a single file or multiple PST files for repair.
Conclusion
To conclude, we have discussed the effects of virus scanner integration on Outlook emails. Additionally, the reasons why you should disable virus scanner integration with Outlook also make you think about adopting professional solutions in case of data loss. Kernel for Outlook PST solution should be in your organization as a prevention measure if you are using MS Outlook.
