MS Outlook: My Email is stuck!

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Every once in a while, an email will get stuck in your Outlook outbox or inbox, and your Outlook stops working properly.  The principle for fixing either hang-up is the same – get Outlook to stop trying to automatically Send/Receive, then go unstick the email.  Solutions for both scenarios are below.

Image by Muhammad Ribkhan from Pixabay

STUCK IN OUTBOX

Usually, this is because it is too big for your hosting company’s mail server.  (Many services have attachment restrictions.)  Occasionally, it’s for no apparent reason at all.

Here’s what to do if it happens to you (Outlook 2003, 2007):

  • Go to Tools>Options>Mail Setup.  Look for the Send/Receive button, and click that.
  • A new box will pop up, uncheck everything. 
  • After that, close and restart Outlook.  Then, go in and delete what is in the Outbox.
  • When it’s deleted, go back into Send/Receive and check ONLY
    • “Include this group in send/receive (F9)”
    • “Schedule an automatic send/receive every _ minutes.”  (I recommend every 15 minutes)
    • Don’t recheck anything else

 

STUCK IN INBOX

If your Outlook is hung up because something is stuck in your inbox, you will need to close the program and go log into your email account online.  Almost all website hosting or email hosting providers provide web access to your email.  (Call them if you don’t know what it is.)

  • To begin, close Outlook
  • Log into your account on the web (webmail).
  • Find the email that has the enormous attachment (or is causing a problem for any other reason) and move it out of the inbox folder to another folder (make a storage folder in your webmail if you don’t already have one).
         NOTE:  Outlook only pulls from your webmail inbox.  Therefore, it does not pull emails that are in other webmail folders.
  • To download the attachment, open the email in webmail, and download the attachment to your computer from there.
  • Finally, restart your Outlook and see if that clears things up.

 

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