Mail stops arriving, or a message sits in the Outbox and will not budge. Nine times out of ten this is Outlook losing its connection to the mail server rather than anything wrong with your account or your message. The checks below are safe and take about five minutes.
Try this first
- Look at the bottom right corner of the Outlook window. It will say Connected, Working Offline, Disconnected or Trying to connect. That one word tells you most of what you need to know.
- If it says Working Offline, click the Send / Receive tab at the top, then click Work Offline once to switch it back on. The button is a toggle, and it is very easy to knock on by accident.
- Check the rest of the internet works. Open a web browser and load a site you do not normally visit. If nothing loads, the problem is the internet connection, not Outlook.
- Press Send / Receive All Folders (the button on the Send / Receive tab, or press F9). Watch the bottom of the window for an error.
- Close Outlook completely and reopen it. Give it a full minute to close before reopening. This clears most stuck connections.
- Restart the computer. Not sleep or log off, a full restart. This is the single most effective step on this list.
- Check the same mailbox in a browser. Go to outlook.office.com and sign in with your work email address. If mail is arriving there, your email is fine and the problem is the Outlook app on that computer. If mail is not arriving there either, the problem is with the mailbox or the sender.
If that didn't fix it
Check whether it is only you. Ask one other person in the office whether their email is flowing. If everyone has stopped at the same moment, say so when you log the ticket, because that points at something central rather than one computer.
Then gather these details, because they save us a round of questions:
- The exact wording of any error message, including the numbers and letters in it. A photo of the screen with your phone is perfectly good.
- What the bottom right corner of Outlook says.
- Whether webmail works.
- When it last worked normally, and anything that changed around then, such as a new password, a Windows update, or a new internet connection.
- Whether the message stuck in the Outbox has a large attachment. Anything over about 20 MB will often stall.
Why this happens
Outlook keeps a copy of your mailbox on the computer so you can read and write while offline. It syncs that copy with the server in the background. When the sync breaks, mail keeps arriving in your mailbox on the server but stops appearing on your screen, which is why webmail is such a useful test. A restart forces a fresh sync and fixes the majority of these.
Please do not delete and re-add the account to try to fix it. On a badly synced profile that can pull local-only items out of view, and it turns a ten minute job into a long one. If a profile needs rebuilding, ask us and we will do it safely.
Still stuck?
Log a ticket at portal.yougrowit.com.au or email support@yougrowit.com.au. If it is stopping you working right now, call 03 9028 4358.
Support hours are Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 5:30pm Melbourne time, excluding Victorian public holidays.
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