How in the Tech

When Attachments Bring your Outlook Outbox to it’s Knees

By Adam Myers ⋅ May 7, 2008 ⋅ Tags: Microsoft Outlook

Those of us that live in an Outlook world – and even those that do but won’t admit it – have seen all sorts of quirkiness and nuances. One of the most frequent ones for me is when an email I’m trying to send becomes stuck in my outbox. This can happen for all sorts of reasons but probably the most common involves emails with large attachments. It’s a bad habit to form but the truth of it all, we rarely look at the size of the files we are attaching.

Email is the most inefficient method of sending files to colleagues. You’d be better off to put the file on a network server and send the direct link rather than the file in question, your mailadmin would be very grateful as well. However, now that this predicament has begun to unfold here’s how to right your wrong.

1. Outlook will not let you move or delete an email in the outbox because “Outlook is transmitting the message.” The trick is to switch Outlook into Work Offline mode first. From the Outlook toolbar navigate to File->Work Offline.



2. Close out of Outlook and ensure that outlook.exe is not running in your process list of Task Manager. Task Manager can be launched from a right click on your Task Bar.



3. Open Outlook and switch to your Outbox. Drag and drop the offending email into your Drafts folder so that you man then edit the email to delete the attachment.
4. Finally, deselect Work Offline to begin receiving/sending of emails as normal.