"ghost" message sent each send/recieve

  • Thread starter Thread starter Fred
  • Start date Start date
F

Fred

I have a serious problem that my ISP can't fix. I'm
using outlook 2003 with Office Professional 2003. About
two weeks ago I attempted to send a .pdf file to someone,
and it kept sending it over and over, even though
the "outbox" is empty. Finally it quit sending that
particular file, but now whenever I send/recieve I get
error ". . . 0x800CCC0F . . . the server responded: 550
MAIL FROM is not allowed to be empty".

My outbox is EMPTY, and I get this every send/receive.
If I send one message, I get 1 of 2 items being sent.
Sometimes my real message makes it, sometimes it sits in
the Outbox for several tries.

What is this mysterious message? I have 1) uninstalled
and re-intalled Outlook 2) deleted and re-set my account
3) stumped my ISP's excellent techies. I have two other
PC's on my home network, and no problem with them. So it
is something local on my PC.

Any help/suggestions would be appreciated before I go the
sit-on-hold route with MSFT.

Fred
 
Outlook is trying to send a read-receipt for a message that you read or
deleted, and your ISP's server is refusing to accept it. The reason is
right there in the error message - "MAIL FROM is not allowed to be empty".
This behavior violates the Internet email standards, which *require* both
delivery and read receipts to be sent with an empty MAIL FROM, and
*requires* mail servers to accept such mail. Tell your ISP to fix their
servers. I'll be happy to point them to the relevant Internet standards, if
they don't believe that they're violating them.
 
Once again, I will say that I think the responsibility for this is on
Microsoft who for some reason changed the behavior of Outlook 2003 from
previous versions so that Read Receipts are now hidden items in the Outbox.
The end user can't get rid of it without some tool that isn't part of
Outlook.

Even if the ISP is wrong the end user is stuck with a message popping up
every five minutes. There are a lot of wrong ISP's out there.

Microsoft should either change the behavior back to the way it was, or give
us some other way to get rid of the message that can't be sent besides
reinstalling the product or deleting a profile and starting over.

Jim C
 
We didn't change where read-receipts are stored - they've never been in the
Outbox (though I've argued that they should indeed go there).

Are you running a beta copy of Outlook, or the released version? I added
code in the released version to fall back to an Internet-standards-violating
method of sending the read-receipts if it was clear that the server we were
talking to refused to follow the standards, so the released software should
send even through a broken server.

In any case, you should complain to your ISP that they're violating the
Internet mail standards. By doing what they're doing, they've essentially
produced a proprietary mail system. Following the standards is critical to
interoperablility of mail servers and clients.

To remove the read-receipt, you could try using OutlookSpy
(http://www.dimastr.com/outspy/) - the receipts sit in the root of the
personal folders.
 
Back
Top