I have a message stuck in my outbox
“I tried to send a large attachment to a friend and now the e-mail is stuck in my Outbox! I’ve been trying to delete it and I can’t because Outlook says it’s still trying to send it. Help!”
This is a fairly common issue that we’ve heard a lot of users report through the blog, so we wanted to write a quick post and explain the easiest way to get out of this situation.
E-mail messages can get stuck in the Outbox for a few different reasons, but the most common case happens when the e-mails are very large (megabyte-wise) due to their attachments. You may even see errors like “Outlook is transmitting the message” when trying to delete them from the Outbox.
So if you’ve got an e-mail stuck in your Outbox and you can’t re-open it, try this:
- Go the File menu, then choose Work Offline in order to stop Outlook from trying to send all mails:
- Switch to the Outbox.
- You now have two options:
a. Move the message: you can drag-and-drop or use the Edit: Move to Folder menu item to move the e-mail to your drafts folder. This will allow you to re-open the offending e-mail and slim it down by removing the large attachments before attempting to resend it.
b. Delete the message: this will immediately remove the message from the Outbox and put it in Deleted Items.
- Go to the File menu, deselect Work Offline to start sending and receiving mail again.
Instead of sending a large attachment, consider putting the file on a local network share or a SharePoint site inside your company and then sending a link around:
For details on how to add a link, see: Use hyperlinks in Outlook items and/or Add links containing spaces to an e-mail message.
If you’re sending it to users outside your company or are just sharing files with friends, you can use Windows Live SkyDrive as a cool and convenient way to store and send large files around.
Hope that helps get you unstuck!