Outlook not sending mails.

scheming_gypsy

Has anybody come across this before and knows the exact reason why it's happening and if there's a patch or fix for it.

At our office we use Office and a mix of Outlook 2000 (Win 98) Express and Outlook 2003 with over 300 mail users. Some of these, numbers unknown, experience an issue when sending mails out.
When they compose a mail and hit send it goes into their outbox and on occasions they'll stay there and all other mails will build up behind it. A manual send and receive still won't send it either. The only way to clear them is to log out of Outlook, then back in and go straight to the Outbox to drag and drop the mails into the drafts folder before sending them again.

It's starting to affect more people now and some are the PA's who sending important mails out that can't wait till they notice it's not been sent.

We have our own POP3 mailserver on site so each client machine doesn't connect directly to the internet to send and receive.



thanks in advance and a note to the anti Microsoft brigade: No we won't use Opera or any other mail client as we use a standard throughout the company and it's branches.

kev1n3

scheming_gypsy wrote:

Has anybody come across this before and knows the exact reason why it's happening and if there's a patch or fix for it.

At our office we use Office and a mix of Outlook 2000 (Win 98) Express and Outlook 2003 with over 300 mail users. Some of these, numbers unknown, experience an issue when sending mails out.
When they compose a mail and hit send it goes into their outbox and on occasions they'll stay there and all other mails will build up behind it. A manual send and receive still won't send it either. The only way to clear them is to log out of Outlook, then back in and go straight to the Outbox to drag and drop the mails into the drafts folder before sending them again.

It's starting to affect more people now and some are the PA's who sending important mails out that can't wait till they notice it's not been sent.

We have our own POP3 mailserver on site so each client machine doesn't connect directly to the internet to send and receive.



thanks in advance and a note to the anti Microsoft brigade: No we won't use Opera or any other mail client as we use a standard throughout the company and it's branches.

Hi.

I have come across this problem before.

First thing to try is disabling your firewall and see if it sends

Have you tried authentication?

Tools>Accounts, select the account & click properties. On the servers tab, select "My server requires authentication". Click settings and type in your username and password.

Hope this helps.

Keep us posted.

Kev

winny_2

Do you know if this only affects people using a particular email client? Since we moved to Exchange 2003 and Outlook XP we've noticed emails don't always go immediately, but at least it pops up a box telling you it's waiting to process the request.

Previously with Exchange 2000 and Outlook 2000 it used to appear as if nothing was happening, but more than likely the server was just too busy to respond.

scheming_gypsy

kev1n3 wrote:

Hi.

I have come across this problem before.

First thing to try is disabling your firewall and see if it sends

Have you tried authentication?

Tools>Accounts, select the account & click properties. On the servers tab, select "My server requires authentication". Click settings and type in your username and password.

Hope this helps.

Keep us posted.

Kev

The accounts and firewalls are set up fine. It's not something that happens all the time just occasionally. Send emails all morning then it stops in the afternoon and you need to give it a kick.

j_davies

If its your own email server not pop but also smtp the supplier can restrict or cut down the flow of email, or there maybe the actual setting in Outlook that puts on queing like scheduling.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/outlook/HP012328171033.aspx?pid=CH100777001033

kev1n3

winny wrote:

Do you know if this only affects people using a particular email client? Since we moved to Exchange 2003 and Outlook XP we've noticed emails don't always go immediately, but at least it pops up a box telling you it's waiting to process the request.

This is a new Outlook security features introduced in Outlook 2000 (SR2 and newer), and installed by default in Outlook 2002 and Outlook 2003. These features guard against viruses that spread by email attachments, as well as protect you from worm viruses tand replicates through Microsoft Outlook.

kev

scheming_gypsy

j_davies wrote:

If its your own email server not pop but also smtp the supplier can restrict or cut down the flow of email, or there maybe the actual setting in Outlook that puts on queing like scheduling.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/outlook/HP012328171033.aspx?pid=CH100777001033

it's not scheduling or the mail the supplier. The clients connect to our mail server than connects down a 2mb link to head office before hitting their mail server and then sending out via the internet, unless it's a internal mail.

It looks more like there's a bug on Outlook that's causing it to hiccup.

albertross_2

do any of these PC's have firewalls or VPN software installed? Are there any network issues that may be limiting the ability of the PC's to see the mail server in a timely fashion, causing a timeout (the timeout is configurable in Outlook)? Are the express PC's set to do an immediate send, or periodic sends?

scheming_gypsy

all are setup to do immediate send and also to send and receive every 5 minutes. I'm not 100% sure if any of the Express machines are having this issue but there's been that many people experience it they all know to log out, go back in, move to drafts and then resend, so there could be the issue on all platforms or just Outlook.

Only firewall is the windows xp firewall and no VPN software on these machines. Can't see it being the firewall as they can receive emails while it won't send and they can send emails all day and then it just gives up till you restart.

Shouldn't be any networks issues. Servers are running on 1Gig cards full duplex and clients are running at 100mb full duplex. Problem affects people randomly and we never have reports of it affecting a bunch of people at the same time just 1 at a time. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't.

andreweastell

kev1n3 wrote: »

Hi.


First thing to try is disabling your firewall and see if it sends

Kev

I had the same problem, I did as Kev suggested and looked at my Norton Security. I unticked check outgoing emails for viruses and they went straight away. In case you are wondering, I did check them for viruses before doing this.
Cheers
Andrew