Emails stuck in your Outbox?

Outlook was really messing with my mind this weekend when it started behaving really oddly. That was, at least, until I discovered a solution using a cunning combination of brute force and extreme web surfing!

On one of my computers I spotted that emails were still sitting in the Outbox long after I had pressed Send. It turns out that this can be caused by .Net framework add-ins that erroneously mark messages as 'read' even if they're sitting in the Outbox. And, of course, you can only send messages that are 'unread' otherwise they would arrive in your recipients' inboxes looking like they had already been read.

So how do you work around this little bit of quirkiness? It's very simple. Open the item that's stuck in your Outbox, then (and this is the important bit) click on a different folder in the main Outlook window, now press Send and don't go back into the Outbox folder until the mail has left.

This 'sticking' behaviour only occurs if you click on the Outbox while it contains a message waiting to be sent. So if, like me, you rely on reopening emails from your Outbox, you might want to learn this tip by heart. Or, perhaps, try disabling the add-in that may be causing this behaviour. Slipstick has a detailed list of offending add-ins here.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2006
  Allister,
  
  I can't believe you found a solution to this problem. we have observed this behavior quite a bit but I wasn't ever able to figure it out. Good work!
  
  -Joe