I travel a good bit; with my laptop – and when the internet access mode changes I find that my Outlook email may occasionally get stuck in the “outbox”.

As we know, when you send an email, it goes into your Outlook’s “outbox” folder and will sit there until an active internet connection is detected. When one hits Send & Receive, the is sent to your mail server for dispatch. BUT, sometimes the email will just not leave the “outbox”, and thus is never ‘sent’. If you try to delete it, you’ll get some obscure email that you can not delete this as it is in the process of being sent.

Bear with me – there is a solution!

The solution:

1: Open Outlook 2007, click ‘Work offline’ in the ‘file’ menu. This keeps Outlook from fiddling about with mail while we work….

2: Open the “outbox” and now you can either choose to delete the errant message or move (drag) the message into your “drafts” Folder.

3: Switch off ‘Work offline’ mode – (File > Work offline) – and Outlook can now receive and send messages again!

4: If you moved the message into “drafts”, you can now go to that folder, open the email, and hit Send again.

That’s it, and email should continue to flow fine!