[funkymunkey]

Hello -

Using Windows XP Pro with all the available patches and SRs fyi.

I've had this sending phantom messages problem for several months and finally decided to do something about it today ;) I'm posting my case here in the hopes that it might help you fix this issue with Outlook 2003 (and/or possibly other versions of Outlook as well).

In addition to the phantom message issue, I was having an issue where messages would hang around in the Outbox and not be sent even after restarting Outlook 2003, and sometimes even after rebooting. That was causing some real problems, particularly when I wouldn't notice messages were hanging until several hours later lol.

So I started researching both problems at the same time, and just for kicks decided to change the port for outgoing mail (SMTP) to see if it helped with the stuck/hanging messages in the outbox. I set my main email account to use port 465 with SSL. I then sent a test message to myself and watched to see if it got hung up, but it did not. Cool, I thought, that might be one problem solved.

Then, before I received the test message back, I saw two read receipts arrive in the inbox - they were from January of this year! Having read that the "Sending 1 of X messages - when the outbox is empty" issue in Outlook can be related to read receipts I was curious if that problem would go away as well.

Sure enough I sent another test message, and for the first time in months Outlook said "Sending 1 of 1 messages" - no more phantom messages - and the email went out and came back smoothly!

Conclusion: changing the outgoing mail port number (and setting it to use SSL) fixed both problems for me. I know that the Microsoft Exchange Server Information Store Viewer (MDBVU32) fix that is described here http://www.howto-outlook.com/howto/d...eadreceipt.htm has helped a number of people, so that's another option. However, I think that changing the outgoing mail port is faster/easier to execute and may work for some.

- FM