Outlook 2003 tries to send to an account marked SEND ONLY

[SLR]

I am away from home, so I created two email accounts, one for my local ISP
(COX) and one for my home ISP (COMCAST). For reasons unknown, the SEND part
of my COMCAST account won't work. After a round or two of finger pointing, I
gave up and set the COX account to both send and receive and the COMCAST
account for receive only. This worked fine at first, but then Outlook
started trying to send to the COMCAST account during one of the automatic
every 10 minutes sessions. I checked the settings for both accounts, but
they had not changed. Even more annoying, after the bogus attempt to send to
COMCAST fails, Outlook proceeds to try re-sending a non-existent message over
and over every minute or so. There is nothing in the OUTBOX, and there never
was. I can find nothing even remotely like this in the knowledgebase. Does
anyone have any idea how I can fix this problem?

 

[Brian Tillman]

I am away from home, so I created two email accounts, one for my
local ISP (COX) and one for my home ISP (COMCAST). For reasons
unknown, the SEND part of my COMCAST account won't work.

When you're connected to Cox, you cannot use Comcast's SMTP mail server and
vice versa. It's called relaying and most ISPs won't allow it. Change the
SMTP server to match the network to which you are attached and make sure
you're properly authenticating to the outgoing server with the proper
credentials.

Outlook started trying to send to the
COMCAST account during one of the automatic every 10 minutes
sessions. I checked the settings for both accounts, but they had not
changed. Even more annoying, after the bogus attempt to send to
COMCAST fails, Outlook proceeds to try re-sending a non-existent
message over and over every minute or so. There is nothing in the
OUTBOX, and there never was.

What most likely has happened is that you received a message via the Comcast
account that contain a read receipt request. Since Outlook uses the
receiving account for any replies, it is trying to send that receipt back
using the Comcast account, which you don't allow to send. Read receipts
don't show in the Outbox, but they're they nonetheless. See
http://www.outlook-tips.net/howto/delete_rr.htm

 

[SLR]

Thanks for the advice. I don't know why I didn't think of using the Cox SMTP
server for my Comcast account. It occurred to me that Cox might be blocking
the Comcast SMTP message, but their so-called tech support never mentioned
that possibility. Also, prior to this, I had used three other ISPs with no
problems. Come to think of it, Comcast, who gave me the settings for how to
configure Outlook to access my email while away from home, never mentioned
this potential problem. Oh, well, live and learn.

I had set the Outlook read receipt option to not reply without asking first,
so I was pretty sure that I hadn't received any emails lately that requested
a read receipt. Then I remembered that I had received an ad from Barnes &
Noble that was still in my inbox. Suspecting that it might contain something
that was attempting to send a message back to the mother ship, I deleted it,
and the constant attempts to send an invisible message stopped.

Thanks again.