Outlook Express sends messages but leaves them in Outbox

Apologies. I didn't answer the right question. I do have IE7 and Outlook Express 6 but I use Firefox. Have tried with IE7 active but doesn't seem to make any difference.

 

Thanks for persevering Peter.

Following the logic of your reply I decided to archive all my email folders and then look at the sizes, deleting most messages from the largest .dbx folders from my Outlook Express.

The largest .dbx file is not surprisingly my Sent Box with 2 GB. Certain folders with names like DIGIT Magazine Summer 2007 are also pretty big!

So, I set about deleting messages in Outlook Express. Surprise surprise: some messages refused to be deleted and no matter what I did (open them and then press delete, move to another folder - if allowed - and delete) I was told that I couldn't delete them.

I am now wondering about setting up a new email program like Thunderbird to see if I can use taht satisfactorily.

 

Thanks Pete.

Your persistence is getting me there!

Having put a backup of my email folders on an external hard drive, and with some messages refusing to be deleted, I started deleting folders wholesale.

And it now seems to work.

I still get two incoming messages but only on some email addresses.

The other good news is that Sky are now sitting up and taking notice. The email support seems to be a lot better than the telephone support and they tell me my line can't support the transfer rate they are using and some of my email addresses may be corrupted. I'm promised some action on both in about five days - probably a downgrading of the service.

Still, if it works that's fine by me.

I'll report back on progress but in the meantime I'm most grateful for your help and for sticking with me.

 

Progress report

I thought I'd leave it a month before reporting back on the problem of messages sticking in the Outbox of Outlook Express, and so getting sent multiple times.

All the good work you did seems to have paid off since the problems are now very few. At the same time, Sky do seem to have made some changes to my account and have actually written to me! The rate of data transfer down my telephone line has been reduced. I am suspicious that Sky had other problems but they are not admitting that.

The outcome is that for most of the time all woorks well. Just very occasionally a message gets stuck in the outbox and although it is actually beeing sent, it refuses to move to the Sent box. As a result Outlook Express continues to send it (to eveyone's annoyance!) until I move it from the Outbox.

Frustrating but I can live with that.

Many thanks for all your help Pete.

 

An answer...

but possibly not the answer!

I've had exactly this problem on one of my PC's (that I normally use for lots of email) that has a similar spec to yours. A combination of lots of different virus/malware checkers weren't solving the problems and extensive searching of Google finally led me here.

Something in this thread triggered a vague synaptic response (a bit like the end of Terminator to be honest, I was down to my last drip of coherent thought) and I checked the file sizes for some of my dbx files. Sent Items.dbx was over 2Gb.

I tried various things:
I compacted without success
I moved older messages into another folder
I deleted some messages

Eventually I created a new folder called "Old Sent ". I shut down OE and renamed Sent Items.dbx to Old Sent.dbx. When I restarted OE it automatically recreated an empty Sent Items folder and everything now works fine.

It seems there is a file size limit in OE but it's a bit of a pain that it doesn't give a proper error message.

Hope that helps a bit.
Bob