Rebecca said:
I send mail and the messages are in my sent folder; however, no one recevies
the mail. I checked with the service provider and they say everything looks
fine. I have removed and added the email several times. I used my laptop
and the email works fine. What shall I do? Reinstall Outlook on my desktop?
If the e-mail gets moved from the Outbox to Sent Items folder then Outlook
received an +OK status back from whatever mail server to which it connected.
If Outlook is told the e-mail was accepted, it can no more. The mail
session looks like it worked to Outlook.
As a test, send a test e-mail to the recipient in the To field and specify
yourself in the Bcc field. Do not send the test e-mail to the same account
from where you sent it, or even to another account at the same e-mail
provider. Bcc yourself the test e-mail at an account that you have
elsewhere. If the recipient doesn't get your e-mail but you do get it at
your other-domain account then your e-mail provider got your e-mail and sent
it okay and the problem is at the recipient's end. If you don't get a copy
of your Bcc'ed test e-mail at your other-domain account then it did not get
sent by your e-mail provider. That could be due to problems at your e-mail
provider or that they never got it from you.
Just because Outlook got an +OK status back from the mail server doesn't
mean your e-mail provider's mail server was the one that got your e-mail.
Some anti-virus program do on-the-fly interrogation of e-mail traffic to
look for infected e-mails. Some, however, operate as a mail server. They
intercept your e-mails from your client as though they were the mail server.
Then they interrogate the complete e-mail before they act as client to send
it on to the real mail server. So your e-mail client gets an +OK status but
it came from your anti-virus program's pseudo-mail server, not from the real
mail server. Since the mail session in Outlook is long over, it has no way
to know that the anti-virus program's pseudo-mail server failed to send on
your e-mail. You have to look in the log files for your anti-virus program
to see if it got an error during its mail session with the real mail server.
Disable the superfluous e-mail scanning in your anti-virus software and
retest. Sometimes it is not sufficient to merely disable the e-mail
scanning function since your e-mail traffic still passes through their
transparent proxy but just not interrogated. You have to uninstall the
anti-virus software and then perform a custom install where you deselect
their e-mail scan feature.
