Sending fine, but email never reaches destination

There is a computer at work whose outlook express 6 seems to be sending emails, but the recipients do not receive them. This began yesterday, and the operator never knew there was a problem until she received phone calls at the end of the day from various people who were expecting files and never got them -- even though she emailed them in the morning.

There are no error messages, the email leaves the outbox and shows up in the sent box, and there is no "mailer daemon" notice in her inbox that the message was undeliverable. The account receives email just fine.

I was going to uninstall and reinstall the email account until I found out that the two other outlook express identities on this computer are doing the same thing.

It’s just this one computer at work, the other computers are working fine, so that probably eliminates the isp and the web host.

Does anyone have any ideas how to fix this problem? Where do you find the repair of outlook express in XP? Where would those emails and their attachments have gone?

Any ideas would be much appreciated!

- maureen

 

Hi, Steve. What have I done to rule out problems on the recipient end?

I asked the operator to email me from her outlook express. While I was talking with her she sent the email; it never arrived. During that same phone conversation, I asked her to go into her mailbox through webmail and send me an email -- the same account, accessible on the host server through the internet -- and it arrived on my machine immediately.

This problem was not unique to her communications with me alone, apparently there were numerous recipients that did not receive emails even though it appeared in the sent folder that they had been sent.

Someone suggested that I try a telnet-send to the server from the command line of her computer to see if port 25 is open. I'm expecting it to be open because there is no error message from outlook express when she sends. I'll do that tomorrow and see if that reveals anything.

I'm still stumped.

- maureen

 

Well, it's fixed. The problem was a free antivirus program that was recently upgraded on that machine.

After trying a reinstall of IE6 sp1 which didn't fix the problem , I decided to do a system restore. When I did that, outlook express worked fine.

With the restore though, I lost two recent installs: a printer and an upgrade to the free antivirus program. When I reinstalled the antivirus, I could no longer send/receive again.

I discovered that the free av program wrongly identified the pop port as 100110 and the smtp port as 10025. I changed the pop to 110; I tried to change the smtp to 25, but it wouldn't accept 25 and I had to put in the host domain name (which is basically what the smtp is for the accounts anyway). After that we were fine.

maureen