Outlook Email Stuck – I came across a very strange problem. I sent an email and it seemed to get stuck in my Outbox. I am using Microsoft Outlook 2010 and I was having some connectivity problems. It seems that when I sent the email, my line dropped. Somehow this caused my email to go into email limbo and remain there. I decided that there had to be other people out there with a similar issue. It turns out that there were one or two people that had come across this problem.
Outlook Email Stuck
As you can see from the screenshot below, there were two emails in my Outbox.
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The one with the date of ‘None’ was the original email that had gotten ‘stuck’ and then there was a second email that I had sent as a test that also wasn’t going through.
Browsing around some help sites, it seemed that there were many ideas floating around. Many people suggested double clicking the mail and clicking on send a second time (I had already tried this, and it didn’t work). Then someone mentioned iCloud and the Outlook Add-In. I decided not to read any further and disable the Add-In right away. The iCloud Add-In ads an additional grouping on your Outlook Ribbon Bar.
To resolve this, I opened up my Outlook Options (File -> Options) and selected the Add-Ins tab. This listed all the Add-Ins for Outlook. You can see the iCloud Add-In below. At the bottom of the Add-Ins screen, you can click on the ‘Go…’ button next to the Manage: COM Add-Ins.
The COM Add-In screen opens up and lists all the available Add-Ins. Next to the iCloud Outlook Add-In, uncheck the checkbox and click on the OK button.
If you have a look at the Outlook Ribbon Bar, you will notice that the iCloud group has been removed.
Finishing Up
Feeling very smart about how clever I was, I then proceeded to click on Send/Receive All Folders and waited for the email to disappear from my Outbox.
To my dismay, the only email that was sent was my Test email (to which my friend Vince dutifully replied “Test Received”). The original email (still displaying ‘Date: None’) was stuck in the Outbox.
I then double clicked the email and clicked on the send button again. This time, Outlook created a second email and grouped both the mails under today’s date.
Outlook however only reported sending message 1 of 1.
After a few seconds, the new email was sent and the original ‘stuck’ email was gone from my Outbox. Looking at my sent items, I could see that my Test email was displayed along with the email that initially got stuck in the Outbox.
While I am not too certain why the iCloud Add-In prevented my email from being sent, or why this situation originally occurred, I am relieved that it was resolved. I hope that this post can help someone somewhere down the line. For further reading (and other offending Add-Ins) see: After viewing the Outbox, messages won’t send by Diane Poremsky
