Cannot send/receive mail through Outlook 2000

[Tom]

A colleague of mine has a Sony Vaio laptop (about 3 months old), Pentium 4
2800, running XP Home, with Office 2000, and the McAfee Security Suite
(antivirus, firewall, antispam etc). Recently, she tried to send an email
and it got stuck in the outbox. She tried to delete the message but Outlook
2000 but told her MAPI was unable to delete the message as it had started
transmitting it. Even on restarting the PC, the message was still there with
the same message if she tried to kill it off,

I managed to kill it off (after reading ng's) by creating a new profile and
importing everything to that, and all seemed well.

Now, another problem has arisen that may be linked to the earlier one.

She uses a wireless Broadband connection through a D-Link modem/router, and
this is fine for internet access. No go on email though! When clicking
send/receive in Outlook 2000, the button flickers as though it is doing
something, but the send/receive information box does not appear for about a
minute. That stays on for a minute or so, and then goes off like there is no
mail. If she has anything in the Outbox, she will eventually get a message
telling her there is no transport available.

She brought the laptop to me and I put it on our wireless network and even
set up a new mail account using our ISP service - got the same problems as
she had. Did a ping on the IP addressess of our ISP's DNS and these respond
OK, so it seemed to me that the problem was in Outlook's ability to
communicate, rather than the laptop's wireless connection, especially as
normal internet access if OK.

So far, I have:

- Done a 'repair' of Outlook;
- Deleted and re-installed Outlook;
- Uninstalled MS Office completely and re-installed it with new profiles for
Outlook;
- Run 'fixmapi.exe' (which did not appear to do anything).

All to no avail

Anyone got any ideas?

One thing to bear in mind is that this is one of the newer Sony Vaios that
does not come with a re-installation CD, or Operating System CD - she did
not create a backup of the HDD when she got it.

Regards

Tom

 

[Brian Tillman]

A colleague of mine has a Sony Vaio laptop (about 3 months old),
Pentium 4 2800, running XP Home, with Office 2000, and the McAfee
Security Suite (antivirus, firewall, antispam etc). Recently, she
tried to send an email and it got stuck in the outbox. She tried to
delete the message but Outlook 2000 but told her MAPI was unable to
delete the message as it had started transmitting it. Even on
restarting the PC, the message was still there with the same message
if she tried to kill it off,
I managed to kill it off (after reading ng's) by creating a new
profile and importing everything to that, and all seemed well.

A better approach is to click File>Work Offline, stop and restart Outlook,
and then delete the message from the Outbox.

She uses a wireless Broadband connection through a D-Link
modem/router, and this is fine for internet access. No go on email
though!

Sometimes caused by the MTU setting in the router. Use Google Groups to
search the Outlook newsgroups for the many times this has been discussed.

 

[Tom]

Thanks for your reply. I have answered your points where they were raised.

Regards

Tom

A better approach is to click File>Work Offline, stop and restart Outlook,
and then delete the message from the Outbox.

Sorry Brian, tried that but it didn't have any effect.

Sometimes caused by the MTU setting in the router. Use Google Groups to
search the Outlook newsgroups for the many times this has been discussed.

This has happened at both her home and here in the office, using different
routers. Our office system supports about 50 people all using the same
configurations. Her copy of Outlook is configured in exactly the same way as
our office PCs. Not sure then how this could be involved. I'm pretty certain
the problem is in the PC itself, although I confess I am not an expert so
could be wrong.

 

[Brian Tillman]

Sorry Brian, tried that but it didn't have any effect.

Other approaches can be found at
http://www.howto-outlook.com/faq/messagestuckinoutbox.htm

This has happened at both her home and here in the office, using
different routers. Our office system supports about 50 people all
using the same configurations. Her copy of Outlook is configured in
exactly the same way as our office PCs. Not sure then how this could
be involved. I'm pretty certain the problem is in the PC itself,
although I confess I am not an expert so could be wrong.

You can always enable logging in Outlook and examine the OPMLog.log file to
see it contains anything unusual or post it here so someone else can comment
on it.