Send/Receive errors

Nothing is more annoying than not being able to get your email when you want it and be presented with a sometimes very cryptic or a seeming meaningless error code instead. Although there are a multitude of error codes that you could be presented with, there are a couple of common solutions that work for many cases.

Aside from offering common solutions, this guide also contains a list of send/receive error codes which you may encounter and their meaning. For certain error codes, a more specific solution is mentioned.

• Check your email account settings
• Disable virus scanner integration
• Check your firewall settings
• Issues with add-ins
• Check data store integrity
• Stuck message or hidden read receipt
• Other send/receive issues
• Send/Receive error codes
• Enhanced Mail System Status Codes
• Other error codes

Check your email account settings.

If you just configured your mail account and are directly presented with a send/receive error, you should start with verifying if your account settings are correct. You can get this information from your ISP or email administrator. Settings for several large free email providers can be found here.

When you are trying to send a message from another network than the network where the mailbox is located (for instance, from a hotel or a wifi hotspot, then you need to enable authentication for the configured SMTP server as well.

When Outlook worked before and you're suddenly presented with send/receive errors, it is still good practice to verify your account settings and make sure that they are current. For example, several ISPs have increased their email security settings which could require you to enable SSL or make port changes. Also, sometimes they have merged with other ISPs and decommission the old account settings over time requiring you to make changes.

Trying your account settings on another computer or creating an additional mail profile for testing could help you determining if it is an issue with your current account configuration settings.

Disable virus scanner integration.

Virus scanners which integrates themselves with Outlook are a known source of causing all sorts of send receive issues. For instance, the following time-out issues are often a result of this;
-The operation timed out waiting for a response from the receiving (POP) server
-A time-out occurred while communicating with the server

Other issues that are often caused by having a virus scanner integrated with Outlook are;
-Outlook being very slow in collecting your email
-Messages ending up stuck in your Outbox (also see below)
-Messages being sent but never received
-Sending or receiving blank messages
-General message corruption

Disabling your virus scanner's integration with Outlook does not compromise your security as you'd still be sufficiently protected by the on-access scanner part of the virus scanner. For more details see; Disable virus scanner integration?

Check your firewall settings.

Firewalls can block incoming and outgoing traffic so make sure that Outlook and/or the required ports for email are listed as an exception to go through.

If you are presented with send/receive errors after updating Outlook, you probably need to reconfigure your firewall to re-allow Outlook to pass-through again. This is because several firewall solutions (such as ZoneAlarm) verify via a hash that it is indeed the correct outlook.exe that is trying to pass through the firewall and not some virus which named itself outlook.exe. Since with some updates the outlook.exe gets updated as well, you'll need to accept it as safe again. You can find more information about this in the manual of your firewall solution.

Issues with add-ins

Aside from virus scanners, there could be other add-ins installed which integrate itself with the send/receive process of Outlook. Loading Outlook in Safe Mode is a good first step to see if add-ins are indeed the cause of the issues.

To further troubleshoot add-ins, manually disable each of them and re-enable them one-by-one to find the culprit.

Check data store integrity

If there are issues with the delivery location (your Outlook mailbox), then this could result in send/receive issues. Checking the integrity of your delivery location can be done with scanpst.exe or scanost.exe (depending on your mail account type). In some cases you'll need to run the pst2gb tool when the data store is full.

If you are using an Exchange account, then you could also try it with Cached Exchange Mode disabled and see if it works correctly now. If it does, rename the ost-file to .old and have Outlook rebuild the ost-file or verify that the configured location for the ost-file in your account settings is valid. 

Stuck message or hidden read receipt

A stuck message is also often a source of having send/receive issues. While it is easy enough to spot a message stuck in your Outbox, in some cases the stuck message can be a Read Receipt which are hidden messages and thus much harder to recognize as the issues and to delete.

Other send/receive issues

Below is a short list of other common send/receive issues which you could encounter but which are not directly identified by a send/receive error.

• Password prompts
  In some cases Outlook can not remember your password for your mail account which results in being prompted for it.
• Receiving duplicates
  When you receive multiple copies of a message or receiving the same message(s) over and over again see this guide.
• Rules not being processed automatically
  When you have rules configured but they are not executed automatically when you receive new emails, see this guide.
• No automatic send/receive upon starting Outlook or cannot edit Send/Receive settings.
  In those cases, reset your srs-file by renaming it to .old.

Send/Receive error codes

Searching in the error list below probably goes best with the Find function of your browser. For most browsers the keyboard shortcut for the Find function is CTRL+F.
When typing in the error code, please note that the error code starts with the digit 0 and not with the letter O.

General Errors

Winsock Errors

SMTP Errors

POP3 Errors

IMAP Errors

NNTP (News Server) Errors

RAS (Remote Access) Errors

Enhanced Mail System Status Codes

Aside from getting the reported errors, there usually also is another error code listed. These error codes consist of 3 digits which could be separated by a dot. For instance; 553 or 5.5.3
These errors could also be sent to you in an email (usually from System Administrator) with a Delivery Status Notification code in it.

The first number will tell you the general status of the message;

• 2
  Success. The message has been delivered.
• 4
  Persistent Transient Failure. This means that the message was valid and accepted by the server but there is a temporary problem which prevents it from being delivered. The mail server will usually try to send it again later until a time out is reached. Until you get the a message that the server is giving up (see "5" below), there is no direct need to resend the message.
• 5
  Permanent. This is a fatal error and the message sent cannot be delivered. It's unlikely that the message can be delivered by a simple resend. A change must be made either within the message (wrong address, too big, too many recipients, etc), within the account settings or at the mail server of the sender or receiver.

The second 2 numbers will give you more details about why the message is delayed or failed;

• X.0.0   Other undefined Status

• X.1.0 Other address status
• X.1.1 Bad destination mailbox address
• X.2.0 Bad destination system address
• X.1.3 Bad destination mailbox address syntax
• X.1.4 Destination mailbox address ambiguous
• X.1.5 Destination mailbox address valid
• X.1.6 Mailbox has moved
• X.1.7 Bad sender's mailbox address syntax
• X.1.8 Bad sender's system address
• X.1.9 Message relayed to non-compliant mailer

• X.2.0 Other or undefined mailbox status
• X.2.1 Mailbox disabled, not accepting messages
• X.2.2 Mailbox full
• X.2.3 Message length exceeds administrative limit.
• X.2.4 Mailing list expansion problem

• X.3.0 Other or undefined mail system status
• X.3.1 Mail system full
• X.3.2 System not accepting network messages
• X.3.3 System not capable of selected features
• X.3.4 Message too big for system
• X.3.5 System incorrectly configured

• X.4.0 Other or undefined network or routing status
• X.4.1 No answer from host
• X.4.2 Bad connection
• X.4.3 Routing server failure
• X.4.4 Unable to route
• X.4.5 Network congestion
• X.4.6 Routing loop detected
• X.4.7 Delivery time expired

• X.5.0 Other or undefined protocol status
• X.5.1 Invalid command
• X.5.2 Syntax error
• X.5.3 Too many recipients
• X.5.4 Invalid command arguments
• X.5.5 Wrong protocol version
• X.5.6 Authentication Exchange line is too long

• X.6.0 Other or undefined media error/bad content
• X.6.1 Media not supported
• X.6.2 Conversion required and prohibited/bad domain or alias
• X.6.3 Conversion required but not supported
• X.6.4 Conversion with loss performed
• X.6.5 Conversion failed
• X.6.6 Message content not available

• X.7.0 Other or undefined security status/authentication failure/violating site policy
• X.7.1 Delivery not authorized, message refused
• X.7.2 Mailing list expansion prohibited
• X.7.3 Security conversion required but not possible
• X.7.4 Security features not supported
• X.7.5 Cryptographic failure
• X.7.6 Cryptographic algorithm not supported
• X.7.7 Message integrity failure
• X.7.8 Trust relationship required/Authentication credentials invalid
• X.7.9  Authentication mechanism is too weak
• X.7.10 Encryption Needed
• X.7.11 Encryption required for requested authentication mechanism
• X.7.12 A password transition is needed
• X.7.13 User Account Disabled
• X.7.14 Trust relationship required
• X.7.15 Authentication credentials invalid
• X.7.16 Future release per-user message quota exceeded
• X.7.17 Future release system message quota exceeded

Common combinations are;

More details about the individual error codes can be found within the base RFC document and its listed updates at the top.

Other error codes

Aside from the above listed error codes, there are many more error codes which you could encounter during send/receive. These usually refer to internal errors from Outlook, are specific to a certain mail server or are actually coming from your virus scanner or another add-in that integrates with your send/receive or networking process.

Due to the nature and origins of these error codes, the list above will probably always remain incomplete. If you encounter a new send/receive error, have a better description or even a solution for it, please email it to me (preferably with a screenshot of the error attached) and I'll update the list accordingly.