Outlook 2003 Truncating Outgoing Emails

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Outlook 2003 is truncating some of my outgoing emails after the first line.
The email is in HTML format.
Rinning 64 bit Windows 7.
Any ideas?

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I am having the same problem on two different laptops. Both are using Outlook 2003 SP3, but one is running 32 bit Windows 7 and the other is running 64 bit Windows 7. Both have all of the latest updates. I suspect one of the recent updates is causing this problem, since it just appeared in the last month. I have searched other forums, but most address emails being truncated when received. This problem seems somewhat random, since not all of my emails get truncated, and those that do have ranged from part of a sentence to a whole paragraph disappearing. So far it has only effected the second paragraph.

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If it’s a Windows update that is the culprit, you could probably solve it as follows:

Check your sent folder to see the date and time that the problem started.
Check all Microsoft updates (i.e. Windows, Office, Outlook). Note the ones which got installed right before the problem started. Write down the update numbers, and then uninstall them. Reboot.

Now see if the problem has been solved. If it has, then you know which update(s) caused it. If you uninstalled more than one, you could try reinstalling them one at a time, with a reboot after each one, to see which one causes the problem. In this way, you will have uninstalled only the offending update.

Be sure to hide that update in the list when you scan for updates, so that it won’t inadvertently get reinstalled.

If the problem persists, even after uninstalling the updates, then it wasn’t a Microsoft update that did it, and you can reinstall the updates that you uninstalled.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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I am not sure exactly when the problem started, but it was in the last two months. Unfortunately that means that I will have to uninstall about 20 updates. This is a new laptop, so there have been a lot of updates. There were several Outlook related updates, so I will try those first.

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I am not sure exactly when the problem started, but it was in the last two months. Unfortunately that means that I will have to uninstall about 20 updates. This is a new laptop, so there have been a lot of updates. There were several Outlook related updates, so I will try those first.

Check your Sent folder. Look at the outgoing emails. Hopefully you will see which ones were truncated.

Or, you might contact someone who you sent one to; they might be able to tell you when the problem started.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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Have you tried resetting Internet Explorer to default settings?

Have you tried running Outlook with add-ons disabled?

If you allow your A/V to scan outgoing email, disable that.

Joe

--Joe

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What does IE have to do with sending email from Outlook? I can send email without IE even running.

My AV is not set to scan my outgoing email.

I checked Outlook ADDins and COM ADDins and found none. Then I learned that there are “invisible” ADDins in the registry. I found 4 that had no reason to be there, because I had disabled those functions in their related software. I have disabled them all and will see if that fixes the problem.

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I have recently began to have this issue and your post is one of the very few that I have found attempting to address it. We are also using both the 64 bit Win7 (running our Remote Desktops) and local PC’s running 32 bit. One of the suggestions I am following up on is inactive time. So far most emails go OK. We think that those that have been sitting around for 25 mins or longer before being sent may be at risk. We have checked this two ways, 1 by sending an email created about 25 minutes before which we then altered a single line of text in just before sending. The email in the sent items folder did not have the updated text. 2. By adding text to an existing email at intervals of around 10 minutes. Everything added after 20 minutes was missing from the email in the sent items folder although it was clearly there when the send button was pressed. I am wondering if somewhere the cached (local) copy is now being ignored when the email is finally sent. This is also very recent and it seems likely that an update has caused it. We have checked the sent item files of the users who noticed it first and the first email I have found with the issue was the 28th of November – I am not 100% sure this was as a result of this problem but it is definitely truncated.

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Outlook 2003 uses IE for rendering HTML. IIRC, the version of IE used is the one installed at the time Outlook was installed.

Joe

--Joe

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I deleted all of the invisible addins and shortened the automatic save time from 3 to 1 minute. I did the last because one of my experiments was to hit the SAVE button before sending and that seemed to solve the problem. Unfortunately that did not last. I don’t have your inactive time issue, because I have my Outlook set up to transmit immediately when I hit SEND. I also suspected that the copy of the email in the DRAFTS folder was out of sync with the message as I was typing it, so that was why I tried hitting the SAVE button before hitting SEND. That didn’t work, but I don’t know if there is any other cached copy. This has become such a problem that I guess I will have to try the drastic step of uninstalling the 20 some odd updates that have been installed in the last month or so. Sigh, do you remember the time when computers were touted as labor saving devices?

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I uninstalled all the Outlook updates that would uninstall on one of our test machines back to the 11th November (some didn’t uninstall), but this didn’t fix the problem. However I then I uninstalled IE11 which was mentioned by one of the earlier posters. This was one of the automatic updates on the 11th November, and with it gone the problem is resolved (at least for Outlook). IE11 seems to be incompatible with Outlook 2003. I tried this on several production machines and it has resolved on all of them so this is definitely the problem, at least for us. We have had IE11 installed on all of our PC’s which are running automatic updates and I have since turned automatic updating off for both our local PC’s and the servers for remote users and will progressively get rid of IE11 on all of them. I am not hopeful of MS coming up with a fix anytime soon and longer term you might consider Mozilla or Chrome as your browser of choice, or updating to Office 2010 which is on our plan for next year.

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Colinmat, I also had come to the conclusion that the problem might be IE11 after I learned that HTML messages were processed thru IE. To test this I switched to all plain text emails and the problem disappeared. I was going to roll back IE11 this morning and was happy to see that you had already confirmed my suspicion. I think that I may go all the way back to IE9, because I was having some problems with IE10. Those problems were alleviated, but not entirely eliminated by IE11. This whole mess reminded me of a comment made by a PC Magazine columnist many years ago when he coined the term “disimprovement” to describe the fact that updates frequently solved one problem while introducing new ones. Per your suggestion, I may abandon IE entirely and switch to Chrome.

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Colinmat, I have a concern about switching to Chrome. The problem that I had with IE10 was cured by using Chrome, but this HTML problem is different in that it uses IE indirectly. Can Outlook 2003 use Chrome’s HTML implementation, or will it only work with IE? Will I have to uninstall IE to get rid of the HTML problem. I am reluctant to switch to Office 2010, because I hate the new UI. It is very difficult to find many of the common functions that I use every day, and they are frequently buried a couple of layers down in the new “ribbon” menu system. This, to me, is a prime example of a “disimprovement”. I have no use at all for composing HTML documents, so these added features are of no interest to me. Maybe I should also abandon Office and switch to one of the open source equivalents.

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I don’t know the answer to what happens if you roll back to IE9. I note that the original post was back in 2009 so there is definitely something going on with IE versions (I think that was still IE7 then). We are running most of our Win7 PC’s on IE10 and had some initial issues with it not recognising the version of ISS we were using to publish our online data. However our application provider has created some new dll’s which fixed the issue. I would be wary about uninstalling IE altogether given Joe’s comment. We do have a few test machines so I might give it a try. We use Mozilla on all our production machines as standard but some staff here prefer Chrome. Good luck and thanks to both you and others for your comments, one way or another they were of great assistance, my staff were getting very ratty with me over this issue.

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I made Chrome my default browser and left IE11 in place on both of our laptops. Since then we have sent several HTML emails both long and short, and there have been no more truncations. Problem solved. BTW, the problem that I had with IE10, which has been partially solved by IE11 and fully solved by Chrome, occurred when I tried to deposit checks to Digital Credit Union using my scanner to enter images of the checks into the website’s check deposit system. There was some sort of conflict between the scanner’s drivers and the DCU website that caused the transfer to hang up and crash IE10. IE11 would work most of the time, but it would still hang up occasionally. There are some things about the Chrome UI that I don’t like, but it works every time, so maybe I will get used to it.

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Just when I thought that the truncation problem had been solved, it reared its ugly head again. It doesn’t happen as often as before, but it still happens at odd times. I guess that I will have to start uninstalling those update after all.

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