Let me further expand upon Matt's solution.  The problem only occurs when using one of the two HTML editors.  If composing messages in text only mode, one *never* ran into the problem.  I believe the problem editor is the FCKEditor (the default), where the Xinha editor works (or did work) fine.

Hopefully, this is a solution everyone can live with.  :)

For the record, I use webmail all the time, but I use plain text mode and rarely run into any problems when composing/sending mail.

Quoting Robert Kriegel <[log in to unmask]>:

Interesting!  Isn't the recommendation to turn compatability mode ON in the latest versions of IE to get IE to work with EBS?  Or, can you say Sisyphus.

bob

Quoting Gary Schrock <[log in to unmask]>:

Matthew's solution here indeed has fixed the problem (and I was able
to go on another machine and turn on the compatibility mode and
reproduce the problem on the other machine).  I'm guessing my faculty
member had managed to hit the little icon next to the address that
toggles the compatability mode on and off accidentally.

Thanks,
Gary

On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 1:12 PM, Matthew <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

It's a problem with compatibility mode in IE, it has to be off.  Next
to the address bar there is an icon that looks like a broken piece of
paper, this toggles it on and off. You won't have issues with other
browsers.

On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 12:57 PM, Gary Schrock <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Ok, I've got a faculty member here that's been having some issues on
msu's web mail, although I suspect it's not really specific to that.
Pretty new computer, and the settings in IE are as far as I can tell
the default.

Basically, she's getting bumped back to the login screen on
mail.msu.edu pretty frequently (as in, far too frequently to be an
inactivity timeout).  It's not completely consistent on how it
happens, but often bringing up either the address book, or messing
with an attachment to a new email will cause it to happen.  I was able
to get it to fail pretty consistently (but still not every time) if I
did a new message, put in a to address, go to the attachment section,
browse for a file and select it, then hit the update button on the
right.  I'd say about 7 or 8 times out of 10 that would bounce me back
to the login screen (and it'll do it in my account too, not just
hers).

Once we even got a message saying that the system didn't trust that we
were who we said we were.

To me, obviously it seems like IE is losing some sort of session
variable, but like I said, it looks like IE is running with default
settings.  And it's kinda of weird to me that it only seems to fail
about 7 or 8 times out of 10 when doing exactly the same thing.
Haven't had a chance to try it with another browser since it's the
only one she had installed, so I'll give that a try when I next get a
chance.

Just kind of odd to me.

Gary

--
Matthew Gregory
Network Engineering
IT Services
Michigan State University
450 Auditorium Rd., CC 305
East Lansing, MI  48824
517.432.7267

--

Joe Besko                      Phone:        517.432.5335
Systems Programmer             Fax:          517.353.9847
Michigan State University      E-mail:       jbesko(a)msu.edu
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313 Computer Center
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