Outlook 2003 Not Sending Email

[Jesse M]

Hello Everyone,

I have a strange issue I can't figure out. It just started a few weeks ago for one of my regular clients that now when he sends email in Outlook 2003 it goes to his 'personal folder' outbox instead of his email outbox.

This is the only email he has setup, but he has on top 'personal folder' going to the outlook.pst file and his ISP email that he uses (also with its own pst file).

Any suggestions to try?

 

[Slaters Kustum Machines]

I would suggest moving to a supported version of Outlook.

 

[Jesse M]

@Slaters Kustum Machines Completely agree and I already mentioned that to him, but since it worked a week ago, why is his outbox emails being defaulted to his personals folder.

 

[Slaters Kustum Machines]

Yeah, I know the position you are in, but the fact is, he is on unsupported software and the fact that it did work, was by chance. MS would say the same thing. Good luck with this. I don't know what would have changed to cause this behaviour.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I do recall that if you had multiple accounts you can choose which one you default send from...that may have changed.

 

[Jesse M]

@YeOldeStonecat , you are correct. That is what I was thinking going in or that he had a large attachment in his outbox, but it was only one account to choose from in the defaults. I wonder if I should rebuild the profile to see if that does anything and if it works, I will remind him that it will probably be cheaper to upgrade to 2016 than pay me more $$$ to solve this issue. I have an hour on the books so far trying to fix this with a few other issues he has going on (long list of 12 different items, 10 fixed, 2 unresolved & strange).

 

[thecomputerguy]

While sometimes it can be rewarding to look like a hero and solve a random issue like that, I've very much adopted a bigger picture repair mentality to a lot of things instead of blowing a bunch of time to fix stuff like this especially in business. Even if you do end up fixing the issue, he probably will continue to have other issues related to using such an out of date version of outlook. I've started to limit a lot of choices I give customers because most of them don't want choices they just want it fixed, and most people will do it the cheapest way possible. If they force me into an option I know is wrong or potentially overly time consuming I'll just tell them to do it my way or I can't help them.

In the grand scheme of things his best option is to upgrade, he might want to cheap out, but he will have to spend the money and upgrade eventually, so instead of beating your head over something like this I'd just tell him to upgrade or he's out of luck.

Example: I have a client who operates his company on a 8 year old desktop with a RAID card in it as their server serving 9 workstations. Some of his workstations are locking up in their database and I told him he either needs to upgrade the server and put in a real server or continue dealing with the lockups. It may not fix the immediate issue of the database locking up but it can't be helping. He will have to upgrade the server no matter what, probably sooner than later, so why not just do it now and rule it out. If the workstations continue locking up then at least we have ruled out the one thing that HAS to be upgraded anyways and take it from there.

 

[Jesse M]

Update: I did get this to work, Changed it to XP Compatibility mode and also found the reason it wasn't sending was the outbound SMTP settings changed and ATT does not use the old settings anymore (started a few weeks ago).

Thank you everyone for your help!

We are doing a new laptop next month for him and Office 365.