Outlook randomly refuses to send some messages with no apparent reason why...
March 24, 2011 9:23 AM   Subscribe

Outlook2007 sometimes refuses to send mail, produces no error messages. There doesn't seem to be any pattern, nor any obvious way to troubleshoot it.

I have a user with a copy of outlook 2007 on XP. Every so often (one outbound message in 25 or so), a message gets "stuck". He hits send/receive, everything works normally, but the stuck message never goes out. Other messages do- whatever is stuck gets stuck permanently.

I disabled his virus scanner as a preliminary troubleshooting step, but that hasn't cured it. I've been able to rule out his upstream server, as we've transitioned to google apps for domains, and the behavior persists.

It doesn't seem to be tied to message size, attachments, or anything else- there doesn't appear to be any particular thread to pull on here.

Any suggestions on how to go about troubleshooting this? Google searches haven't been terribly helpful besides the advice to turn off antivirus. Is there an outlook error log somewhere I could examine? The windows event tool didn't seem to show anything.
posted by jenkinsEar to Computers & Internet (6 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
How big is his sent mailbox? I've had to deal with this issue whenever my sent email box approaches 2GB in size.
posted by MegoSteve at 10:16 AM on March 24, 2011


When the messages is "stuck" is it stuck in the outbox? Is there a particular way that your determining that it is not being sent? In the meantime, try running the Office Diagnostic Tool just to make sure your install is good. (under Help/Run Diagnostics)
posted by samsara at 11:53 AM on March 24, 2011


Can't help with the diagnostics, but I know a workaround for the user: reopen the message, type a character or two (e.g., periods) and resend. For some reason it works.
posted by LonnieK at 12:03 PM on March 24, 2011 [1 favorite]


You can turn on logging by following this KB article.

Is this Outlook being used with Exchange or with pop/imap? In either case you may want to look at server logs. Outlook keeps items in the outbox if the server rejects them or is having issues. If everything looks good server-side then you might want to try a repair install.

I've also seen this happen when the user's computer is set to go to sleep mode and Outlook loses network connection and puts itself in offline mode. Typically the fix is to disallow sleep mode.
posted by damn dirty ape at 7:03 AM on March 25, 2011


Also, make sure you're running that latest service pack for Office.
posted by damn dirty ape at 7:09 AM on March 25, 2011


Response by poster: We got this fixed- turns out the AVG antivirus uninstaller doesn't actually uninstall AVG antivirus; making the antivirus more than a little like a virus itself. While we enjoyed the irony of the situation, we ended up downloading an actual uninstaller from the AVG site and actually removed it for real this time- getting rid of the realtime virus scan ended up being the only way to convince outlook to send emails consistently.
posted by jenkinsEar at 6:24 PM on April 14, 2011


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