Mysterious emails being sent

[FastFinger]

Running Outlook 2010 on an Xp sys.

I have my own domain with an email account. It sends and receives email via POP on Outlook. Lately when I hit the send/receive button the status bars shows that it's sending emails, even though I didn't compose any to send, and there aren't any emails in the "out" folder. Later there's no record of any unknown emails in the "sent" folder either.

What's going on with these phantom sends?

Thanks

[SandDiegoDuner]

Brief summery is stuck read receipts in the outbox. Just ignore them as it is harmless and more of a hassle to clean them out.

A quick search on google will give you more detail

[Nose Nuggets]

may i ask why you are using POP? POP is prone to issues, and IMAP servers the same purpose with virtually no downsides.

[Rivers]

With Outlook, if the PST file is too large, weird stuff can happen. It was AWFUL with 2003, BAD with 2007 and simply POOR with 2010 versions. Under File>Data Management, look for the active (not archived) data file, typically called OUTLOOK.PST in the folder. Check the file size. If it is greater than 1.7GB, you may be at risk. You should archive older emails, etc. to reduce that PST file size, then the problem will go away until the next time. More recent versions of Outlook claim to support larger PST files but my experience is very mixed about that claim. Smaller is more reliable anyway and you can quickly access old emails in the archives anyway.

[JDay]

may i ask why you are using POP? POP is prone to issues, and IMAP servers the same purpose with virtually no downsides.

And IMAP leaves the messages on the server, so you do not need to worry about keeping backups of all your downloaded email.

[Rivers]

The downside of IMAP is when the hosting company has a crash or other catastrophic failure, your hosted email can be toast. There are upsides and downsides to both POP and IMAP. Some email accounts I configure as IMAP on my iPad or phone, and the same account as POP on my main computer. POP on phones, etc. can also hang because of a file that restricts access to an email account to one device at a time. Sometimes that file isn't deleted when a phone is done checking email, thus locking access to the account. IMAP avoids that issue.