StickBoy
08-30-2010, 09:30 AM
The user: my father, a 75 year old newbie with five years computer experience.
The computer: a Dell laptop running Windows XP SP3, fully updated.
The antivirus program: Avast, with outbound email scanning disabled.
The email program: Outlook Express.
The problem: When he sends emails with larger attachments (~2MB) to multiple recipients, they are often sent repeatedly. A couple weeks ago I found thirteen copies in my Inbox.
I have tested this on his computer and found it to be not user error.
On sending an email with a 2MB file to a couple of my own addresses, the error message box comes up saying that there is a problem, please refer to the error message below, but the usual area where an error message would be is blank.
Him being a novice, he doesn't understand error messages and simply clicks Close. The problem: the email is still sitting in the Outbox, so every time OE runs its Send/Receive cycle, it gets sent again, to all recipients.
It never makes it to the Sent folder though.
I checked the internet for others with this problem and there are many! But their solutions didn't work for me.
What I have tried: He doesn't save any email, but all his sent emails are in the Sent folder. Thinking this amounted to more than 2GB, I separated them into folders by year, thus reducing the size of the actual Sent folder considerably. (It currently contains only items sent since July 1 2010.)
The "Break apart messages larger than..." box was already unchecked.
As mentioned above, I turned off the antivirus scan of outgoing emails.
I tried removing my main email address from the list of recipients, in case that was causing the problem, but nothing changed.
He is using Gmail with POP activated. I checked his Gmail account and the test emails I sent are all there in the Sent items folder, multiple times.
As I said above, this is a Dell laptop, so there is no installation disc, so no chance to re-install Outlook Express, if that were even possible.
Is there any other solution?
Please no suggestions to buy a new computer, get Windows 7 or even change mail clients. He is 75 years old and still mastering Outlook Express. There is no chance to get him to learn a new operating system or mail program. We need a fix for Outlook Express!
Thanks for reading this long post. I appreciate any help or suggestions you can give me!
The computer: a Dell laptop running Windows XP SP3, fully updated.
The antivirus program: Avast, with outbound email scanning disabled.
The email program: Outlook Express.
The problem: When he sends emails with larger attachments (~2MB) to multiple recipients, they are often sent repeatedly. A couple weeks ago I found thirteen copies in my Inbox.
I have tested this on his computer and found it to be not user error.
On sending an email with a 2MB file to a couple of my own addresses, the error message box comes up saying that there is a problem, please refer to the error message below, but the usual area where an error message would be is blank.
Him being a novice, he doesn't understand error messages and simply clicks Close. The problem: the email is still sitting in the Outbox, so every time OE runs its Send/Receive cycle, it gets sent again, to all recipients.
It never makes it to the Sent folder though.
I checked the internet for others with this problem and there are many! But their solutions didn't work for me.
What I have tried: He doesn't save any email, but all his sent emails are in the Sent folder. Thinking this amounted to more than 2GB, I separated them into folders by year, thus reducing the size of the actual Sent folder considerably. (It currently contains only items sent since July 1 2010.)
The "Break apart messages larger than..." box was already unchecked.
As mentioned above, I turned off the antivirus scan of outgoing emails.
I tried removing my main email address from the list of recipients, in case that was causing the problem, but nothing changed.
He is using Gmail with POP activated. I checked his Gmail account and the test emails I sent are all there in the Sent items folder, multiple times.
As I said above, this is a Dell laptop, so there is no installation disc, so no chance to re-install Outlook Express, if that were even possible.
Is there any other solution?
Please no suggestions to buy a new computer, get Windows 7 or even change mail clients. He is 75 years old and still mastering Outlook Express. There is no chance to get him to learn a new operating system or mail program. We need a fix for Outlook Express!
Thanks for reading this long post. I appreciate any help or suggestions you can give me!