Solved Mail in outbox in Outlook 2003

[caltroon1]

We use Outlook 2003 only for the calendar and contacts. We've never associated it with email or set up an email account. All of a sudden this week when shutting down Outlook we get a notice that pops up and says "You have unsent mail in the outbox. Do you want to send it now? Shutting down in 15 seconds.

I've deleted a file called outlook.dbx and that didn't help. The default program list shows Microsoft Outlook and use for mail is checked but the checkmark is grayed out and I can't uncheck it. Since it has never been used for email, no email account, I cannot figure out what to delete to get rid of that message.

Thank you

 

[Ranger4]

Hi caltroon1, welcome to the Forum.

Have you done a full virus scan of the computer, you could also download Malwarebytes & do a full scan with that as well.

Do you have another email account on this computer & if so, is it a later version of Outlook, then possibly there has been a mix up with email sending.

 

[caltroon1]

Problem is fixed

We'll never kmow what exactly happened, but it was the .pst file. We were lucky because my husband does the calendar and always emails me the pst when he does the calendar. So we went back in his sent messages and used one of the ones that was before this problem started (sometime this week, he tells me). So we may have to re-enter a few items, but at least we have the bad pst file gone.

So it's always wise to save a few pst files when you overwrite them - maybe save to a flash drive or a different hard drive. You never know when you need to restore one.

Thank you for your response.

 

[Ranger4]

Thank you for getting back & glad to hear you have fixed the problem.

 

[mrjimphelps]

Basically, by saving the .PST files, you are in effect doing backups of Outlook 2003. What you did was restore a previous backup.

As to why the problem occurred in the first place, if an email got into the outbox, it couldn't go anywhere because Outlook 2003 isn't set up with any actual email account. An email may have gotten into the outbox on your husband's computer, but for whatever reason, it never got sent. When Outlook 2003 saw it in the outbox, it kept trying to send it.

As for why you couldn't get rid of it out of the Outlook 2003 outbox, my thought is that it may have something to do with perhaps being in Outlook 2007 format, an unknown format in Outlook 2003, and so Outlook 2003 was unable to deal with it.