Outlook (any or all versions) POP mail in Outbox not retried

I've come across this on various versions of Outlook using POP3 email so it may be a design decision, or a bug .

As I understand/observe it, when you send an email in Outlook it puts the email in the Outbox then, depending on the settings, it sends it straight away, or at least tries to. When sent it moves it to Sent Items.

In the event of the sending failing, e.g. a brief problem with one's SMTP service, the email stays in the Outbox but Outlook doesn't attempt any retries. The only way, it seems, is to open the email in Outbox and click Send again.

It came up again yesterday when I was sorting a few problems on a friend's PC. They're on Virgin and have @ntlworld.com email addresses. She'd been able to send and receive email ok from her account, but though her husband could receive emails, he hadn't been able to send emails for a few days, some sort of SMTP server error message it seems, though I didn't see the error message.

There were as few emails in his Outbox which hadn't gone and they didn't seem to be going. I tried opening and Sending them again and they sent OK and Outlook moved them to Sent Items. Clearly he now knows to open and Send in this situation. But it begs the question as to why Outlook doesn't try to resend such emails.

Have others seen this? Any fixes for it?

Edit: It's not an anti-virus issue as I've seen it happen with various AV products.

Edited by cheshire_man (Sat 04-Feb-12 17:57:47)

Reducing the send/receive time setting will increase the chances of a success, as will enabling the setting to send all on exit.

Hmm.

I've just done some tests by changing my SMTP server to something silly and seeing what happens. I dropped the Send/Receive interval to 3 minutes to avoid having to wait too long. When I send an email it fails and stays in Outbox as expected. Leave it for a couple of Send/Receive cycles to make sure it continues to fail (though why it shouldn't is another matter). Then just after a Send/Receive I changed the SMTP server back to its correct setting. At the next Send/Receive it sent it ok.

Hmm. Maybe I'm imaging things and unfairly denigrating Outlook (2010 version at least). My bad.

Thank you. You may now go and play your bagpipes on the solar panels of a certain Hereford resident .

In reply to a post by cheshire_man:

Thank you. You may now go and play your bagpipes on the solar panels of a certain Hereford resident .

LoL!

I'd rather scratch them with my dirk.