Comments on: How to delete or resend an email message stuck in Outlook's Outbox

The article explains how you can quickly remove or resend emails that are stuck in your Outbox. The solutions work on all systems and all versions of Outlook 2016, 2013, 2010 and lower. Continue reading →

Comments page 5. Total comments: 155

  1. there's a message in below right corner of outlook page as follow:
    receiving message 13.4 MB
    and mail not able to open (as it's more than email limit allowed 8 MB,
    please advice how i can open that mail, or remove it?

  2. Hello Dear,

    I had configure my personal mail id with outlook and send 966 mail at once some mail which was sent was showing in sent folder and other was showing into outboox and now i want to delete all just because of i want to configure my official mail into outlook but still i am unable to clear outlook outbox mails.
    Please help....

  3. Thank you, Thank you, THANK YOU! That stinking email has been hung up for 2 weeks! MSOutlook Help, was no help! You're brilliant!

  4. Hi Guys, While sending the email with attachment, its holding the outbox. already i had created the new pst file and reconfigured the outlook and re install the OS also . But its till not able to resolve , Kindly help me

    0x800CCC0F--SMTP server is not responding or "unable to connect to outgoing or SMTP mail server"

    Without attachment mail working fine

    No antivirus installed

    SMTP port No :-25

  5. I'm not sure if this is a phishing problem or what but I have a contact that is shown in my drafts folder. Whenever I click on the drafts folder to try and delete it, 3 occurrence's of the contact pops up and is saved to my contacts folder. The only way I can get away from this is to close outlook and restart.
    So anytime I touch the drafts folder it does this.
    I've tried to remove this through my webmail server but it does not see the same thing.
    Help is appreciated. Thanks.

  6. Ok, it finally worked.

  7. This message is stuck in the outlook.com account noted in this message.

  8. This technique does not work for any of the solutions outlined. Can you provide another method for disposing of a message?

  9. Thanks for the advice, I had a out-going email that would not go out and was stuck there. Could not delete it or move it. So I took Outlook off-line and that worked. Thanks so much for the answer.

  10. I had a message stuck in the outbox which had already started to send so I could not open it or drag it to another box. However I eventually got rid of it by closing Outlook (ticking the box 'exit without sending' on the way) and re-opening it. The message was still there but I was able simply to delete it by right-clicking and picking 'delete' from the drop-down menu.

    Thanks for this page - it gave me hope!

    1. Same thing happened to me. It was a large attachment and Outlook already started to send it. I couldn't drag it, delete it, open it or resend it. I closed Outlook, used the task manager to close Outlook, tried exiting without sending, rebooted my machine, but nothing worked!
      Finally I clicked on the dropdown box on the task bar where it says "Send/Receive" with the little folders icon. There is a selection to "Cancel Send." I clicked on that, then went to the Outbox and finally was able to delete the message.

      Gone!!!

  11. Work Offline method works!!!

  12. Thank you very much for your assistance.
    worked perfectly.

  13. I have an iMac with the message stuck in Outlook but not in outbox. How do I delete in this scenario as it is slowing up my emails. I know that the reason is because i have large attachments but just need to delete.

    thanks

  14. Trying to help my 94 yr old father with his hanging email from long distance. He tried to send a video he had saved from his phone to his computer. I have given him all the instructions of the three methods all to no avail. He cannot get or receive emails. The third method was difficult in 2007 as I see is mentioned in another post. When you go to select the new .pst file it doesnt show in list to set as default. Any suggestions? None of the ways to delete has worked. Uninstall program and reinstall ?

  15. I have a 179MB email, whihc i sent bimistake via outlook. It says that its transmitting, and it has been there like that for last 2 weeks. I want to delete that email because it is slowing down my oother emails from being sent.

    Please help me with a solution.

  16. I have an email in my outbox and i cant send out.i think its stuck. i can't deleted it too. What can i do? Please help because it take a longer time to send out my other emails.

  17. I did not wait the allotted time before going back into online mode, and now the email is gone from the outbox, but clearly still processing on my server since my inbox purports to be over the size limit. Any advice??

    Thanks!

    1. Hello Hannah,

      I am very sorry, we are unable to help you with this issue.

  18. Thank you! excellent solution

  19. THANK YOU SOOO MUCH FOR THIS INFORMATION- YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW LONG I TRIED TO DELETE A MESSAGE THAT WAS STUCK IN MY OUTBOX FOREVER. THANK YOU!!!

  20. Thank you.... at last the message has gone.

    Really appreciate this post

  21. if double click outbox canot open this item outlook has already began transmitting this message coming

  22. Thank you, thank you, thank you! Finally a solution that worked. I was going crazy with that message stuck for a couple weeks and the "work offline" trick worked for me!

  23. Hi there,
    My problem is that something is sticking up my outbox and I think it is hidden as I have managed to delete or put in drafts all the guilty emails but still wont send and now I get the error message - too many messages but none are showing up.
    Before this there was a way to search for these hidden files using the start menu but I can't remember?
    Thanks for the help
    Alice

  24. A ton of thanks. Set Outlook to work offline and then remove a stuck message works for me. Thank you again...:)

  25. If you try method three. (Working with outlook off-line) you may find it is successful if you also disable (switch off) your router before reopening outlook.

    Apparently, even with outlook being "off Line" if the internet is still available, somewhere in the background outlook will still attempt to send the hanging message thus preventing its deletion.

    Happy deleting, A

    1. I tried everything to delete an email with a 78mb video file attached, but it stuck in Outbox. I use Outlook 2007 and Win 10. Tried for hours. Came to this tip - switched off the router and it worked immediately

  26. Hi

    I have tried all teh suggestions but without success. I have one message stuck. It contains a few attachments. The same email was successfully sent to three other recipients.

    I was trying to send the email to 'brighouse.echo@brighouseecho.co.uk' It is only 28MB

    I am using Outlook with Windows 8.

    Any ideas?

    A

    1. Hello Angie,

      Are you trying to resend or delete a message? If the former, then probably your server blocks sending if a message contains any attachment in a forbidden format like .reg, .exe or something else.

  27. YAY! Thank you, it worked going into process. The opening outbox from the search did not delete the 78mb file I tried to send and could not shake. WHOOP!

  28. I got to the third method and outlook crashes when I name the new data file and click ok. Also, no "account settings" box comes up in 2007, to "set as default" even if it would allow me to create the new data file. So this method does not appear to work in 2007. But mine are stuck (I believe) because I moved and the outgoing server it's trying to use, is no longer the right setting.

  29. Trying to figure out how to delete.all my message in my email i have over 999

    1. Hi Quintina,

      You can try creating a new pst, copying all your folders and messages there and after that deleting the problematic .pst file with all those 99 emails in Outbox.

  30. Hi,
    Thanks for ur help it really worked.

  31. Thanks alot! Worked out at the windows task manager step.

  32. Hi Svetlana

    This is my 3rd occurence of having a large email stuck in Outlook folder. This time it was a huge email and your advice on Ending the the process via Task Manager sorted the problem.
    Thank you very much. I will pocket you in my great solutions pocket.

    Kindest regards

    Jim

    1. Hi Jim,

      I'm glad to know the solution worked for you. And your "great solutions pocket" put a smile on my face, thank you for that! :)

  33. Thanks. I had to use the general approach and take Outlook offline. Worked fine,

  34. Hi, I have an email I sent in Outlook from my iPhone and I can't figure out how to delete it - the file is too large and when I go into my outbox it won't let me delete the message it's trying to send.

    Thanks,

    Kendra

    1. Hello Kendra,

      If the message contains a large attachment, please try to open if from your Outbox and delete the attachment first.

  35. I have been trying to figure out this problem for quite a while. From what I can tell, it is not a new issue as there are a lot of postings reporting a similar issue regardless of the version of Outlook.

    I do not have a solution but I have noticed that whenever a message gets stuck, the email address is enclosed with quotation marks. If I retype the address instead of a simple REPLY with no quotation marks, the message goes out immediately.

    Has anyone else observed the same behavior?

    1. Thanks so much. This worked immediately for me. I also noticed that I did not have this person in my Contacts, so I simply added them. Hopefully, I don't have to go through this again.

    2. Yes, that often works. But Outlook is so unpredictable in its behaviour. A colleague had three messages stuck today. We removed the '' from one of them, and one of the others went at the same time, even though it still had the ''

      Astonishing.

  36. When i am reverting on a mail then the receiver is getting a blank mail.

    suggest me.

    thanks

    1. Hi Ashish,

      Does this happen with all the replies you send or with certain recipients only? Anyway, I am afraid it is impossible to pin down the source of the problem remotely. There may be plenty of causes both on your side and on the recipient's side. Try sending plain text messages instead of HTML. If this does not work, you may have some IT person try to diagnose the problem on site or contact Microsoft support for assistance.

  37. Thanks for your tips. I have had an email that has been hanging in my outbox for months now, holding up all my other emails. Your tips were to the point and exactly what I needed, it worked.

    I am very grateful.

    Thanks

    1. Hi Yolanda,

      I am really glad to know the tips were helpful. Thank you for your feedback!

      1. hello svetlana how are you

  38. Worked a treat. Thank you very very much. :)

  39. Yes, I know (and now my boss knows too...) but the problem remains that the e-mail is stuck in the outgoing mail box...

    1. Hi Mia,

      I you have tried all the suggestions described in the article, then I have no other ideas. Really sorry for not being able to help you with this issue.

  40. Hi
    There's a computer at the office (my boss's!) where I also tried everything without luck... Here's some information: Outlook 2010, imap, appears normal in outbox (not bold), 1 messsage with attachment (70MB), recevier gmail.com
    Any way to get this solved?

    1. you need to check on windows update and antivirus
      and if they are all up to date am sure you should be able to send and receive emails without any problem

    2. Hi Mia,

      As far as I know Gmail allows sending messages up to 25 MB in size. Please see this page for more details: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6584?rd=1
      In case of a bigger attachment, you can either zip the file or save it to Google Drive instead of sending by e-mail.

  41. Hello

    I followed every single instructions above and still can not delete the stuck email in the outbox.

    Any other ideas please?

    1. Just click on send/receive and you will see show progress and cancel all click on cancel all and go to outbox now delete the stuccked email from outbox.

      1. Tried a million ways to delete emails with pic attachments this worked. Thank you so much!

    2. Hi Ali,

      Please specify how many messages are stuck. Do all or some of them contain an attachment? What domain name are you sending the message(s) to? Also, which Outlook version and account type do you use?

  42. Tried all 3 methods and still have the message stuck in the outbox unable to delete

    1. Hi Karen,

      You can check other solutions explained in this article: Why an email is stuck in Outbox and how to make it send. If these do not help either, then please specify you version of Outlook, account type (Exchanger server, POP, IMAP, Gmail etc.), and how exactly the stuck message appear in your Outbox (normal or bold) and we will try to figure out the cause.

      1. Hey. That's a Cool tip. Thank you!! :)

      2. Karen, I tried everything under the Sun to try to remove a large file I had stuck on my Outbox in Outlook.com. Until this morning: I went to outlook.com and the file stuck on the outbox[1] was still there. I RIGHT CLICK'D IT AND DRAGGED IT TO THE RECYCLE BIN. Immediately it was gone from the Outbox.

        John

        1. Thanks so much, John! So glad I saw your comment... it's the only thing that worked. Wish I had tried that first!

          1. Awesome tip dude, solved my issue in a second!

      3. I tried every trick I knew and this issue was making me crazy! Your article had the problem fixed in seconds! Thank you so much!

        Katy

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