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Level 1

5 points

Unsent email message

Every time I try to use mail, It tries to send one email, fails and i get a message about a failure to connect to smtp.me.com or something like that. The strange thing is , I can send and receive emial just fine. Mail just has one problematic email or thinks it does, that it can't send.
How to I get to the bottom of this and purge this single email from my system ???

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.3)

Posted on Apr 4, 2010 9:43 AM

Best reply

nevets2

Level 1

77 points

Posted on Apr 17, 2010 6:36 PM

My new iPad Mail program also says it has 4 unsent messages. When I click on the update logo, it goes through the process of sending those messages. Then, when it's done, it still says "4 unsent messages".

What really frustrates me is that I cannot find a way to read what those messages are. The regular OS X Mail program creates an Outbox to put messages in when it can't send them and those messages are readily available to read and edit and try to send again.

How can I see these unsent messages on my iPad Mail program?

Steve

View in context

27 replies

May 28, 2010 10:42 AM in response to Roger Sels

I am having this problem (with email attachments), tried a hard reset too but it still remains. Anything else one can do? Is this a bug?

May 29, 2010 7:36 AM in response to marc123

I have the same problem with email not sending. I have two accounts. MobileMe and gmail. Gmail works fine and sends no problem. As usual, MobileMe is the problem.
MobileMe mail will get stuck and after closing the mail app and waiting a few minutes I have to reopen the app, delete the problem email from the MobileMe outbox, then resend it...from gmail.
I have the wifi iPad. This usually happens to me on specific networks (friends house in the US and a hotel in Canada).
I am sick of MobileMe. I don't care why it doesn't work, only that it doesn't. MobileMe mail ending up in spam was bad enough. This makes it nearly useless.

May 29, 2010 10:14 AM in response to marc123

I am having the same problem regarding unsent message. Apple needs to enable a draft and an outbox folder for the mail.
There needs be a way to get those unsent message.

May 29, 2010 1:12 PM in response to uniquemhg27

I have an outbox folder (MobileMe) when the message does not send. It is only available when there is unsent mail.

Jul 11, 2010 3:53 PM in response to marc123

I've had two messages sitting in the Outbox for two days, and the most offensive thing about it is the lack of any error message. I didn't know there was a failure until a day later, when my friend responded to other messages I'd sent but not these.

There's no excuse for allowing a user to think his mail has been sent when it hasn't. To top it off, there's no way to attempt to re-send messages in the Outbox. "Send" isn't an option.

Jul 31, 2010 1:21 PM in response to Stokestack

I just noticed this happened when I tried to send some pictures to facebook.

This always worked before with my iPhone 3gs + iOS 3. Pretty lame.

Tried rebooting but outbox messages have not been sent.

Jul 31, 2010 1:51 PM in response to Jonathan Cano

OK, I just tried sending a test message and my iPhone said "couldn't logon to the smtp server because your password is not set" or something like. I went into settings for my gmail and it did show the correct length password (just obscure dots). I reentered it and now my emails appear to have been sent.

BTW, I'm still using a generic imap account for my gmail because that was how I set it up before a "gmail" account properly supported archive.

EDIT: I spoke too soon. It now appears nothing was sent from the outbox.

Message was edited by: Jonathan Cano

<Edited by Host>

Jul 31, 2010 1:48 PM in response to Jonathan Cano

Hmmm, my problem may have been a case of "stupid user".

When I went in and provided a password, I set the pw for imap, not smtp. After going in and setting it for smtp my mails started going out.

DOH

Feb 15, 2011 4:29 PM in response to marc123

I'm still seeing this problem almost a year after the first message on this thread. Tried the hard reboot and no change. Guess I'll have to gobtonthe Genius Bar and see ifvthey know what to do there.

Mar 22, 2013 6:26 AM in response to G. L. Gray

Did the hard reset with no change. I then went to outbox and deleted the messages with a red exclamation point. It worked!

Lam269

Level 1

0 points

Jan 17, 2016 7:09 AM in response to marc123

This is what helped me. I have century link, and I went into mail contacts and calendars, selected my account, went to ADVANCED, turned on SSL, server port is 995, then went back to the account name in the upper left hand corner. Opened up mail, scrolled down to accounts, sselected my account, went to outbox.

i Then selected an email that could not be sent. When I touched the body of the email, another page popped up with the body of the email I was trying to send, and it let me send it. I did this for each email that was not able to be sent, and they all sent.

Hope this helps

msej449

Level 1

8 points

Jan 18, 2016 3:40 AM in response to marc123

I have a subset of this problem and have finally figured-out a work-around. I have a long-standing 'given.surname@me.com' account which was 'converted' to a 'given.surname@icloud' account. I recently upgraded to a new iPhone 6 and I set up my iCloud account as directed. This gave me photo sharing etc and a working @icloud.com mail account. But I could not send from this, only receive. There was no failure notification. Deleting the iCloud account and resetting it again didn't help. This is what seems to work, and let's say I'm AppleID 'steve.jobs@icloud.com', Password 'non-1ntuitive'

1. Delete and remove any existing iPhone iCloud account e.g. steve.jobs@icloud.com in [Settings:iCloud]

2. Re-setup your iCloud account (for photo sharing etc.) as steve.jobs@iclound.com / 'non-1ntuitive' but disable Mail in [Settings:iCloud]

3. In [Settings:Mail, Contacts ..] add a new, generic IMAP account as follows

IMAP Account Information

Name - {whatever}

Email - 'steve.jobs@me.com'

Description - {I used '@me.com'}

Incoming Mail Server

Host Name - 'mail.me.com'

Username - 'steve.jobs'

Password - 'non-1ntuitive'

Outgoing Mail Server

Host Name - 'smtp.me.com'

Username - 'steve.jobs'

Password - 'non-1ntuitive'

This gave me the iCloud photo, contacts sharing etc. that I wanted and an email account (which I could have called 'iCloud' but for clarity, I so far have called '@me.com' in case of further problems). I can now send from this account. This also receives emails to steve.jobs@icloud.com as effectively an alias for steve.jobs@me.com

My analysis is that this is a side-effect of Apple continuing to use given.surname@me.com as the basis for my identity, but merely aliasing this to given.surname@icloud.com for AppleID etc. In reality, @icloud.com is just an email alias and the functioning email element remains as @me.com. But their internal scripting of AppleID access and synchronisation is faulty and doesn't recognise this use case, so the automated iCloud setup gets confused. If so, then it's very poor software engineering and testing.

Unsent email message