Victor said:
I'm using Outlook 2002 and 2003. An annoying feature is that when you have a
number of emails in the Outbox and you press Send/Receive, the emails are
sent in reverse chronological order i.e. the most recent first. This means
that if you are sending two or more emails to the same person, they actually
arrive in the wrong order!
Is there any way to prevent this happening please? The only way I could
think of was to set the options so that Send/Receive operates very
frequently e.g. every minute, but I don't really want to do that.
Any ideas please?
Doesn't matter which order you have them listed in YOUR Outbox folder.
Doesn't matter which order the messages are delivered from your e-mail
client to the SMTP server. When you send multiple messages inside the
same mail poll, there is no guarantee in the order they get received by
the recipient. You have no control over the ordering of sent e-mails
from your mail server. In fact, an e-mail you send in a later mail poll
with your SMTP server may arrive before an earlier e-mail that you sent.
Perhaps the receiving mail server was busy, unresponsive, or a host in
the route between your sending mail server and the receiving mail server
was slow, unresponsive, or down and later that router was okay but
meanwhile your sending mail server has been retrying to send that
earlier e-mail. There is no guaranteed delivery order for e-mails.
Your e-mail client will establish a mail session between it and the mail
server. It will send the commands needed to transfer the message(s)
from your e-mail client to the mail server. Order is not important
since that order is not guaranteed. The order your mail server sends
out your e-mails (and everyone else's) is up to the mail server, not
you. The route may change. The receiving mail server may be busy so
the sending mail server has to do retries. There may be intervening
hosts between the sending and receiving mail servers that vary regarding
responsiveness. E-mail is not a guaranteed delivery mechanism. It also
doesn't guarantee order of delivery.
You can only hope that e-mail transactions go smoothly and immediately
without any errors or recovery processes when sending an e-mail;
however, e-mails all delivered within the same mail poll cannot be
guaranteed in which order the recipient will see them by the time it has
progressed from your sending mail server, through any intervening hosts
in the route between your sending mail server and their receiving mail
server, deposited by the receiving mail server, or when polled by the
recipient's e-mail client. You could try NOT sending the second e-mail
until a later mail poll and hope the first e-mail shows up first in the
recipient's e-mail client. That is, send the first e-mail, wait
something like 10 to 30 minutes, and then send the second e-mail. Don't
expect e-mails (regardless of what order they appear in your e-mail
client) to get delivered in any particular order when they are all sent
inside the same mail poll.
