Running eM Client 9.2.2157 on Windows 11 Pro 23H2 on a ThinkPad X13s. Suddenly, people weren’t receiving any emails sent from my Outlook account. Prior to having problems, I made no changes to eM Client’s settings. This happened without warning, and my other, non-Microsoft email accounts worked fine.
More specifically, I was preparing for a court date and my lawyer wasn’t receiving my Outlook.com emails. Neither of us knew there was a problem until 2 days later, which meant that we were not as well-prepared for court as we should have been. Then, in our unplanned rush, I inadvertently compounded the initial problems, trying to send a horde of documents to the court before a 5 pm deadline, and caused new problems because I mistakenly sent 25 MB of attachments in one email. Still, this wasn’t the cause of the initial problems that started 2 days earlier.
My intended recipient also made no changes to her email program (Gmail) prior to her not receiving my sent emails. There is a possibility that there was something wrong on her side. However, after 2 days of trouble, I was able to forward the non-received emails to her other Gmail account where she received them just fine, and the next day, after I fiddled around with eM Client’s accounts and settings, everything returned to normal.
There is also a possibility that AT&T or T-Mobile factored in somehow, as I’m using a cellular laptop (Windows on ARM) with a SnapDragon CPU. This seems unlikely. Why would it only affect my Outlook.com account and only my sent email in that account? My phone calls and internet use ATT or TMO according to whichever SIM chip I have inserted in my phone or laptop for unlimited internet, and I had no loss of internet connectivity (listening to music continuously) the entire weekend when this eM Client glitch occurred.
Based on what I see in the top left corner when I use a web browser to log into my Outlook account, my account has not yet been transitioned to Exchange format and is still using IMAP and/or EAS aka AirSync.
I suggest, if anyone is using eM Client and a Microsoft email account to send and receive legal documents, do not trust them exclusively. In addition to eM Client and your MS account, also use another client or web-based email, and also use a non-Microsoft email account. Especially if you have an in-person court date coming up.
Description of problems:
1. My lawyer sent me several urgent emails on Wed 4-10, Fri 4-12, and Sat 4-13.
2. I responded several times, sending a few attachments (less than 10 MB).
3. I noticed that she didn't reply for more than a day and wondered why.
4. She emailed me in the early afternoon on Mon 4-15, "Please, PLEASE, have the courtesy to tell me what the heck is going on with you since you've been singularly unresponsive and unavailable."
5. I replied, "The last email from you was 2024-04-13 at 158 pm. The last phone communication was your text from yesterday."
6. I then realized that, for some reason, I was seeing her emails but she wasn't seeing mine.
7. Looking in my Sent folder, I confirmed the emails that I sent her in the past 3 days were there.
8. We met in a nearby town and, while in her car, I forwarded all the Sent emails to her other email account.
9. She confirmed that she was receiving them at her other email account.
10. I sent a plain text from my Outlook account to my work email account where it appeared without delay.
11. I replied to that email and saw the reply in my personal Outlook email account without delay.
12. Per my lawyer's request, I scanned dozens of pages of financial papers to send to Family Court.
13. The file sizes were too big to send in one email so I consolidated them into 5 separate PDFs, approximately 8, 9, 14, 1, and 16 MB in size.
14. Shortly before 5 pm, in a rush to send them before the deadline, I inadvertently sent all 5 PDFs in one email.
15. Almost immediately, eM Client displayed a repeated error message, "[AirSync] Sending email failed with error: ServerError."
16. I tried to send each PDF in a separate email.
17. Each time I clicked on Send, the email disappeared but didn't show up in the Sent folder.
18. I still kept seeing the AirSync error message.
19. Within eM Client, I switched to my work account and successfully sent the 5 PDFs from there.
20. I closed and restarted eM Client. The AirSync error messages continued popping up.
21. I rebooted the computer and reopened eM Client. The AirSync error messages resumed.
22. I don't recall seeing the emails in the Local Folders section (other forum posts indicate the emails would be stuck there in a limbo state, but I didn't see anything there until after I deleted and re-created my account in the next few steps).
23. I deleted my personal email account in eM Client. Since it was an IMAP account with the emails stored on the server, I didn't create a local backup.
24. I closed and reopened eM Client, and recreated my personal email account with Automatic Setup.
25. Finally, the AirSync messages stopped.
26. I tried to send a few test emails.
27. The emails disappeared and didn't appear in the Sent folder.
28. I saw a square red logo with a number next to Outbox in the Local Folders section (I don't recall seeing any emails stuck here until now) and discovered the missing emails languishing there.
29. The next day, I spent several hours reading eM Client forum posts and doing research on eM Client settings and Outlook email server settings.
30. I experimented with different settings with no luck. Sent emails refused to send.
31. I tried to recreate my email account as an Exchange account.
32. The wizard could not find the Exchange server so I typed in outlook dot office365 dot com, but eM Client couldn't confirm my password or access my email.
33. I tried to recreate my personal email account as an IMAP account without Automatic Setup (clicked on Menu – Accounts – Add account – Mail – Other and entered in Microsoft's and eM Client forum members' recommended IMAP and SMTP settings manually).
34. No matter what combination of server, port, and security policy, eM Client repeatedly asked for my email password and wouldn't accept my (known good) password.
35. I closed and reopened eM Client, and recreated my account with Automatic Setup.
36. Everything started working normally again!
37. I created several files of increasing size (2, 5, 8, 9, 10, 13, 15, 18, 19, 20, 25 MB).
38. I sent experimental emails with increasingly large attachments.
39. Emails sent up to 20 MB, but when I tried to send a 25 MB attachment (which appeared as 33 MB within eM Client), the email refused to send and languished in the Outbox of Local Folders.
40. I was able to send other emails that bypassed the frozen one.
41. I deleted the frozen email and resumed normal use of eM Client.