Iâm running the following software: Windows Vista Home Premium Version 6 SP
2 Build 6002, Microsoft Outlook 2003 SP3 Professional Edition, on a Dell
Inspiron 530 with 3 GB of RAM. I can receive both plain text and HTML email
messages with attachments in Microsoft Outlook 2003. When I reply-to or create
a new HTML email, the message remains in the Outbox and is sometimes sent
multiple times. If I convert to plain text or create a new plain text email,
the email is sent and goes correctly to the sent folder. If I attach a document
to plain text email it remains in the Outbox and it is not sent. Iâve reloaded
Microsoft Outlook software. Can I correct this situation or do I just to move
on to other email software?
In this excerpt from
Answercast #66, I look at various reasons why email might not be sending
correctly.
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Email wonât send
Iâm not convinced that this is actually an email software related issue.
The symptoms that you describe are symptoms that I often see when your email
service is rejecting your email for either taking too long to send or for being
too large.
Email too large
Now, it is the case that an HTML email, containing the same
message, is going to be larger than the plain text email message that contains
the same information. I wouldnât expect it to be so dramatically large that it
should cause your ISP, or your email service provider, to hiccup on it; to say
that it takes too long to send. But those are the kinds of things I would look
at; especially because even just adding an attachment to your plain text email
message is causing you this problem.
So what I would do, instead of suspecting Outlook, I would first see who
your email provider is. Ask them for assistance on this. It is possible that
there is something that is set incorrectly, or something that is specific to
your email service that might be causing this kind of behavior.
Unfortunately, (I donât know who your provider is) but I will say that the
answer youâre going to get from them is going to vary dramatically. There are
going to be some IPS that are going to immediately say, âit canât possibly be
our problem.â But if youâve got a good ISP theyâll, hopefully, help you
diagnose this a little bit, and come to some kind of resolution.
Try a different program
If not, you can certainly fire up a different email program. With Vista
youâve got Windows Mail there for you.
You donât have to move to it to try it out. You can certainly fire it up,
and configure it for your email account. See if using it makes a difference of
any sort. My suspicion is that it might not, but itâs really hard to say.
Repair install
The other thing that I normally suggest in this case is that you either run
a repair install, or a reinstall of the entire Microsoft Office. Youâve
indicated that you reloaded the Microsoft Outlook software. Iâm not exactly
sure what steps you took to do that but there are two specific approaches that
I typically recommend in order to accomplish that.
If you havenât done either of these, Iâd recommend trying those as well.
That is whats called is called a repair install:
-
When you go to Control Panel, in Programs,
youâll find an entry there for âMicrosoft Office.â -
If you right-click on it and then click on Change, what it
will do is it will actually fire up the setup program. -
One of the options in the setup program will be to ârepair the existing
installationâ of Microsoft Office.
That will include Microsoft Outlook. Thatâs one thing to try.
Uninstall and reinstall
The other, more radical, approach (rather than just installing it on top of
your existing installation) would be to uninstall Microsoft Office completely
and then reinstall it from scratch.
Naturally before you do that, youâre going to want to back up your data;
specifically your PST files. Thatâs one way to pretty much guarantee that
Microsoft Office gets reset to its default state.
Like I said, Iâm not leaning towards Microsoft Outlook being the problem
here. I really do think itâs something related to your ISP or email service but
it certainly is something that you can rule out by doing these steps.
Next from Answercast 66- Why
does my backup use all available RAM and fail?
It may be that the HTML email messages actually are very large. Some âsignaturesâ attached to emails contain several images. If the images are not sized properly, they can take up megabytes. (Leo talked about graphic file sizing in a recent Answercast). If the ISP is rejecting supersized messages, resizing the images would be one immediate strting point.
This happens to me a lot. Mine are just ordinary emails, text only, no attachments. This did not happen with hotmail, but does in the newer Outlook,com. I will send or reply to a dozen emails, and then check the Draft folder. Sure enough one or two will be stuck in there.
Sounds very familiar, as this typically happens when port 25 is blocked by the ISP. The solution is to use an SMTP server. It took a while for me to figure this out, while staying in Asia. You can read more about this on http://timreviews.com/cant-send-mails
Frank