Removing Email Stuck in Outbox in Outlook

Posted on: December 7th, 2011

I have helped a few people recently with this problem. In each case they tried to send an email with a very large attachment, or a collection of pictures.I’ve looked around for a simple write-up on how to fix it but didn’t find one. So I’m just going to write down how I fix these cases.Why does it get stuck?

Outlook does not check the limitations of the mail server and continuously tries to send the email. Because most internet connection’s upload speeds are slow, therefore sending a several megabyte large email would take over 5 minutes which is more than any server allows for a single connection. So Outlook gets stuck in an infinite loop. It starts sending the message, it fails after a few minutes & Outlook immediately re-tries it, it fails again and then Outlook tries again, ad infinitum… And because 99.9% of the time the message is in process of being sent you won’t be able to delete it, unless you are very lucky and catch it in the very short time when it has not started sending it yet.

The Solution

1, First Outlook needs to be stopped from continuously trying to send the message. The easiest way to do it is to put Outlook in Offline Mode (File menu -> Work Offline checked). This prevents Outlook from using the Internet. You can also disconnect your machine from the internet by unplugging the network cable, or turning off the wireless).

2, Outlook needs to be shut down completely. There are several ways to do it:
- Close outlook and wait about 10 minutes. You need to wait that long because it won’t quit completely until the last transaction finished (sending that large email) or failed.
- Kill the Outlook.exe process in the task manager
- Log off from the current user (that forces to close all applications started by the user, including Outlook).

3, Start Outlook up again & make sure it stayed in Offline mode

4, Delete the email from the Outbox

5, Put Outlook back in online mode (clearing the check mark from Work Offline).

6, Make sure Outlook can send and receive again.

That’s it. It usually only takes a few minutes to do. So far all cases got resolved by this simple process.

Did you find this information useful?
Please consider donating.

You can leave a comment for the above article. Comments will not show up automatically but will be reviewed and incorporated into the article if they contain useful information.

cforms contact form by delicious:days