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Why no email Outbox? Is there a workaround?

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Dave Rado

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Oct 2, 2012, 6:39:27 AM10/2/12
to
I recently moved to TB from OE, and one thing about the email client
puzzles and irritates me.

In OE if an attempt to send an email failed, the email would sit in my
email Outbox and OE would periodically try to resend it automatically,
until it succeeded. I could just forget about it and leave it to OE.

But for some weird reason, while I have an Outbox under "Local Folders",
I don't have one under my email account. If I explicitly select "Work
offline", my emails go into the Outbox under "Local Folders", but if I'm
working online and my email provider's SMTP server just happens to be
playing up and timing out, which it does from time to time, the emails
I'm trying to send don't go into any Outbox, they just sit in my drafts
folder. So I have to keep *manually* trying to resend them until the
SMTP server comes back up, it doesn't retry automatically, which is
infuriating and quite time-consuming.


Is there any workaround for this problem?

Dave

Jay Garcia

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Oct 2, 2012, 8:32:55 AM10/2/12
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On 02.10.2012 05:39, Dave Rado wrote:
If mail is waiting to send after you click "Send", the mailbox "Unsent
Messages" is auto-created until you chose to File => Send Unsent Messages


--
Jay Garcia - www.ufaq.org - Netscape - Firefox - SeaMonkey - Thunderbird
Mozilla Contribute Coordinator Team - www.mozilla.org/contribute/
Mozilla Mozillian Member - www.mozillians.org
Mozilla Contributor Member - www.mozilla.org/credits/

Dave Rado

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Oct 2, 2012, 9:47:20 AM10/2/12
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On 02/10/2012 13:32, Jay Garcia wrote:
> If mail is waiting to send after you click "Send", the mailbox "Unsent
> Messages" is auto-created until you chose to File => Send Unsent Messages

That doesn't happen to me. The email just remains open, and if I close
and save it, it sits in my drafts folder. How can I make it behave as
you describe?

Dave

MikeR

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Oct 2, 2012, 9:51:07 AM10/2/12
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Mine go to the "Drafts" folder. See "Account settings-->Copies & folders"

Jay Garcia

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Oct 2, 2012, 10:07:57 AM10/2/12
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On 02.10.2012 08:47, Dave Rado wrote:

--- Original Message ---

Click on File => Send Later or CTRL+SHIFT+RETURN

Dave Rado

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Oct 2, 2012, 10:34:45 AM10/2/12
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In Account Settings > Copies and Folders I can't see anything relating
to messages that have failed to be sent.

Dave Rado

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Oct 2, 2012, 10:37:23 AM10/2/12
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On 02/10/2012 15:07, Jay Garcia wrote:

> Click on File => Send Later or CTRL+SHIFT+RETURN


But will Thunderbird then automatically try to resend it periodically
until it succeeds? Or will I still have to tell it manually to resend
it? In OE it was automatic.

Dave

Jay Garcia

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Oct 2, 2012, 12:00:23 PM10/2/12
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On 02.10.2012 09:37, Dave Rado wrote:

--- Original Message ---

Manually only at this time. There may be an addon for this but I can't
find one offhand.

dillinger

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Oct 2, 2012, 1:27:14 PM10/2/12
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Setting mailnews.sendInBackground to true might do it.

Dave Rado

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Oct 2, 2012, 2:27:12 PM10/2/12
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On 02/10/2012 18:27, dillinger wrote:

> Setting mailnews.sendInBackground to true might do it.

When I try that, *all* my messages go into the Outbox, even when the
SMTP server is working fine, and they don't actually get sent until I
manually select File + Send Unsent Messages. So it makes things even
worse than they were before, unless I'm missing something. Thanks for
the suggestion though.

Dave

Dave Rado

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Oct 2, 2012, 2:32:52 PM10/2/12
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On 02/10/2012 17:00, Jay Garcia wrote:

> Manually only at this time. There may be an addon for this but I can't
> find one offhand.

a) Does anyone else know of an addon that fixes this?

b) How does one raise a development request?

Dave


Ray_Net

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Oct 2, 2012, 3:25:22 PM10/2/12
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As i see your posts, it's better for you to return to OE.

David E. Ross

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Oct 2, 2012, 4:35:59 PM10/2/12
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Submit a "request for enhancement" (RFE) bug report at
bugzilla.mozilla.org.

>
> Dave
>
>


--

David E. Ross
<http://www.rossde.com/>

Anyone who thinks government owns a monopoly on inefficient, obstructive
bureaucracy has obviously never worked for a large corporation.
© 1997 by David E. Ross

Dave Rado

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Oct 2, 2012, 7:21:59 PM10/2/12
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On 02/10/2012 20:25, Ray_Net wrote:
> Dave Rado wrote, On 02/10/2012 20:32:


> As i see your posts, it's better for you to return to OE.

OE doesn't work with Windows 7.

Dave Rado

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Oct 2, 2012, 7:22:28 PM10/2/12
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On 02/10/2012 21:35, David E. Ross wrote:


> Submit a "request for enhancement" (RFE) bug report at
> bugzilla.mozilla.org.

Thanks.

Dave

Wayne

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Oct 2, 2012, 7:26:06 PM10/2/12
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if you have set mailnews.sendInBackground and the mail isn't sent, then
I'd say there's a failing message at the top of that queue/folder that
is holding up the rest of the messages.

I know this because I've been using mailnews.sendInBackground=true for a
couple years. And I know we have a bug report already for the problem
mentioned above - no need for a new one.

To put this another way - if you can send the message with
mailnews.sendInBackground=false, and you have nothing in Outbox, and
change mailnews.sendInBackground to true and send the same message to
the same destination, there's no reason it shouldn't send immediately.

Mike Easter

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Oct 2, 2012, 7:35:28 PM10/2/12
to
Dave Rado wrote:
> Ray_Net wrote:
>> Dave Rado wrote, On 02/10/2012 20:32:
>
>
>> As i see your posts, it's better for you to return to OE.
>
> OE doesn't work with Windows 7.

OE (and now its offspring) has always been somewhat of an enigma. It is
always much maligned by those who extol the numerous superiority aspects
of other news readers which are more standards compliant, better
filters, and less troublesome editors.

OE is such a classic example of MS's tendency to 'revise and extend' the
standards to suit themselves and their coders. Consequently OE works
the best when it is exchanging messages with another OE, such as their
implementation of Quoted-Printable which is pretty much incompatible
with other agents. It is also classic as an example of something whose
bugs were retained version after version.

But it has enough 'pleasant' features to have made it one of the most
popular mail and news agents around, especially when one goes to the
trouble to compensate for its weaknesses with 3rd party apps such as
proxies. Naturally this popularity was once influenced by the dominance
of MS OSes, their integration with IE and its agent OE.

One of my biggest gripes about Tb is its non-compliance with proper
format=flowed although it claims to be f=f. OE (and WM) have their own
style of doing f=f which is 'best' compliant only with OE's f=f. OE to
OE f=f is stronger than Tb to Tb f=f.

There are some things such as f=f that Opera does better than both of them.


--
Mike Easter

Dave Pyles

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Oct 2, 2012, 8:09:13 PM10/2/12
to
Dave, I'm not sure just when you want your mail to go into an "Outbox"
(the aggressive trimming here seems to have removed the original post).
The way Thunderbird is supposed to work is as follows:

When you are online and hit the "send" button the mail is sent
immediately. When you are offline (the icon on the left end of the
status bar toggles online/offline) and you hit a message to send a
message, Thunderbird asks you if you want to go online and send the
message and if you decline the offer, it creates a folder called Outbox
and puts the message there. The next time you go inline Thunderbird
asks you if you want to send the messages in the Outbox.

If you want to create a message and send it at a specific later time
there is a nice extension called "Send Later" that makes that very easy:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/send-later-3/

I don't know whether any of that is helpful, but I thought I'd offer it
anyway.

Dave Pyles

Dave Rado

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Oct 2, 2012, 9:10:54 PM10/2/12
to
Hi Dave

On 03/10/2012 01:09, Dave Pyles wrote:

> Dave, I'm not sure just when you want your mail to go into an "Outbox"
> (the aggressive trimming here seems to have removed the original post).

I can still see the original post, not sure why you can't, but it said:

On 02/10/2012 11:39, Dave Rado wrote:> I recently moved to TB from OE,
and one thing about the email client
> puzzles and irritates me.
>
> In OE if an attempt to send an email failed, the email would sit in my
> email Outbox and OE would periodically try to resend it automatically,
> until it succeeded. I could just forget about it and leave it to OE.
>
> But for some weird reason, while I have an Outbox under "Local Folders",
> I don't have one under my email account. If I explicitly select "Work
> offline", my emails go into the Outbox under "Local Folders", but if I'm
> working online and my email provider's SMTP server just happens to be
> playing up and timing out, which it does from time to time, the emails
> I'm trying to send don't go into any Outbox, they just sit in my drafts
> folder. So I have to keep *manually* trying to resend them until the
> SMTP server comes back up, it doesn't retry automatically, which is
> infuriating and quite time-consuming.
>
>
> Is there any workaround for this problem?
>
> Dave


Subsequently someone suggested using Send Later whenever the SMTP server
times out, but that doesn't really help because TB doesn't attempt to
resend the email, so the only difference it makes is that instead of
sitting in my drafts folder until I manually attempt to resend it, it
sits in the outbox until I select File + Send Unsent Messages, which
isn't a significant improvement.

Then someone suggested turning background sending on, but that didn't
help either.

What I want is an add-on that forces TB to periodically attempt to
re-send emails that have failed to be sent when the SMTP server is
playing up, just as it periodically checks my pop server for new messages.

Dave

Dave Rado

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Oct 2, 2012, 9:13:05 PM10/2/12
to
But it doesn't send immediately on my machine - in fact it doesn't send
at all unless I select File + Send Unsent Messages - and there are no
other messages in the outbox, so how do I get this working?

Dave

Dave Rado

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Oct 2, 2012, 9:17:10 PM10/2/12
to
On 03/10/2012 00:35, Mike Easter wrote:
> Dave Rado wrote:

> OE (and now its offspring) has always been somewhat of an enigma. It is
> always much maligned by those who extol the numerous superiority aspects
> of other news readers which are more standards compliant, better
> filters, and less troublesome editors.
>
> OE is such a classic example of MS's tendency to 'revise and extend' the
> standards to suit themselves and their coders. Consequently OE works
> the best when it is exchanging messages with another OE, such as their
> implementation of Quoted-Printable which is pretty much incompatible
> with other agents. It is also classic as an example of something whose
> bugs were retained version after version.
>
> But it has enough 'pleasant' features to have made it one of the most
> popular mail and news agents around, especially when one goes to the
> trouble to compensate for its weaknesses with 3rd party apps such as
> proxies. Naturally this popularity was once influenced by the dominance
> of MS OSes, their integration with IE and its agent OE.
>
> One of my biggest gripes about Tb is its non-compliance with proper
> format=flowed although it claims to be f=f. OE (and WM) have their own
> style of doing f=f which is 'best' compliant only with OE's f=f. OE to
> OE f=f is stronger than Tb to Tb f=f.
>
> There are some things such as f=f that Opera does better than both of them.

I'm not familiar with what f=f is but agree that OE was quirky while
being very user-friendly in general. For some weird reason MS replaced
it with Windows Live Messenger, which IMO is about as far from being
user-friendly as it's possible for a GUI application to be, so I moved
to TB. I love Lightning, and I like many aspects of TB. A few aspects,
like the issue I'm trying to resolve in this thread, are currently
causing me problems but I hope someone will help me resolve those.

Dave

Mike Easter

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Oct 2, 2012, 9:42:55 PM10/2/12
to
Dave Rado wrote:

> I'm not familiar with what f=f is but agree that OE was quirky while
> being very user-friendly in general. For some weird reason MS replaced
> it with Windows Live Messenger,

Actually, MS replaced OE with Vista's Windows Mail, which like OE from
previous MS OSes, came 'preinstalled' with the OS.

There is a complex mostly unpublished story about 'what happened' to
Windows Mail re Win7, but the short version is that it was intended to
be included, but MS's interests in that regard were thwarted.

Consequently it was 'necessary' for MS to 'remove' WM from Win7, but WM
can be 'restored' to Win7, which gives Win7 a mailnews agent which is
quite similar to OE.

After WinMail was removed, MS's public recommendations to people who
wanted a mailnews agent were to either acquire some 3rd party agent, or
to engage the Live products such as WLM, which is a derivative even
further from OE's roots.

After the earliest versions of WLM, it lost the ability to add quote
levels to reply messages rendering it useless as a news agent, along
with some other differences from OE and WM which are discussed in
articles such as the wikipedia.

Some Win7 users install the 'old' WLM version (which can add quote
levels) while others go to the trouble to install/restore the Vista WM
to Win7. The majority find some other agent such as Tb, and then they
miss some of the OE features.

> which IMO is about as far from being user-friendly as it's possible
> for a GUI application to be, so I moved to TB. I love Lightning, and
> I like many aspects of TB. A few aspects, like the issue I'm trying
> to resolve in this thread, are currently causing me problems but I
> hope someone will help me resolve those.

The story of linux news agents (including the use of Win agents with
linux WINE) is complex, but Tb currently suits me better than the
alternatives.

With XP systems I use both OE and Tb. With my one Vista system, I use
WM. With all of my linux systems I use Tb, rarely dabbling with
something else to research some question.

That above is all about text messaging in newsgroups. Unlike OE, Tb is
totally useless for anything binary that requires combining or most
decoding.


--
Mike Easter

Dave Rado

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Oct 2, 2012, 10:41:47 PM10/2/12
to
I still don't understand why MS didn't simply make WM officially
available and fully supported and promoted, for Win 7. They may have
been prevented from *bundling* it into the OS, but nothing was
preventing them from making it available and promoting its use.

I also don't understand why they created and now promote WLM, which is a
truly horrible product.

For that matter, I don't understand why they created WM either, as from
what I can gather, it is inferior to OE.

Anyway, I don't fancy the idea of trying to use WM under Win7, when it
isn't properly supported and has a tiny user base. Plus I have sent and
received a lot of emails since moving to TB and I don't fancy trying to
migrate them from TB to WM. Plus I have fallen in love with Lightning,
and AFAIK, WM has no integrated diary app.

Dave

Mike Easter

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Oct 2, 2012, 11:16:51 PM10/2/12
to
Dave Rado wrote:

> Anyway, I don't fancy the idea of trying to use WM under Win7, when it
> isn't properly supported and has a tiny user base. Plus I have sent and
> received a lot of emails since moving to TB and I don't fancy trying to
> migrate them from TB to WM. Plus I have fallen in love with Lightning,
> and AFAIK, WM has no integrated diary app.

Tb, like Firefox, has a lot of strengths which are partly related to
add-ons.

For a time, Tb's and Firefox's rapid release cycle was breaking a lot of
those valuable add-ons. We can only hope to see that problem resolve
itself somewhat.

There was a recent thread here about synchronizing Tb's addressbooks
between computers and also synchronizing its addressbook with gmail's.

There is also an add-on to synchronize Lightning with Google Calendar.


--
Mike Easter

Mark Banner

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Oct 3, 2012, 3:15:58 AM10/3/12
to
On 03/10/2012 02:13, Dave Rado wrote:
> On 03/10/2012 00:26, Wayne wrote:
>> if you have set mailnews.sendInBackground and the mail isn't sent, then
>> I'd say there's a failing message at the top of that queue/folder that
>> is holding up the rest of the messages.

Just a reminder that mailnews.sendInBackground is experimental - there's
still a few issues where if you shutdown Thunderbird at the wrong time,
your email may be lost (though generally if you make sure all your email
has sent before you shutdown you should be fine).

>> To put this another way - if you can send the message with
>> mailnews.sendInBackground=false, and you have nothing in Outbox, and
>> change mailnews.sendInBackground to true and send the same message to
>> the same destination, there's no reason it shouldn't send immediately.
>
> But it doesn't send immediately on my machine - in fact it doesn't send
> at all unless I select File + Send Unsent Messages - and there are no
> other messages in the outbox, so how do I get this working?

That's kinda strange. Its an automated process that should pick up the
fact there's been a message added to the outbox.

There's two things you can do to look at this. First take a look at the
Activity Manager during the send process (accessible via the Tools
menu), once you've "sent" the message and it is in your outbox, it
should pretty much straight away (iirc within a second) start to send
the message. If there's a failure it should be displayed on the activity
manager window.

The other place you can look is on the Error Console (again accessible
via the tools window), if you clear it down just before you hit send,
then any errors or warnings appearing as a result of the send should be
obvious.

Mark.

WaltS

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Oct 3, 2012, 8:26:58 AM10/3/12
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On 10/02/2012 09:10 PM, Dave Rado wrote:
<snip>

> What I want is an add-on that forces TB to periodically attempt to
> re-send emails that have failed to be sent when the SMTP server is
> playing up, just as it periodically checks my pop server for new messages.
>
> Dave

My questions to my ISP would be, "Why is your SMTP server so unreliable?
Should I look for another ISP, or are you going to resolve the problem?

Do you know why the SMTP server is playing up?

--
Fedora 17 (64-bit)
Gnome or KDE Desktop
Thunderbird Earlybird

Ray_Net

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Oct 3, 2012, 10:59:08 AM10/3/12
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So Windows Live Mail could be your solution:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/download-outlook-express


Ray_Net

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Oct 3, 2012, 11:03:48 AM10/3/12
to
Dave Rado wrote, On 03/10/2012 01:21:
Or use the non free Outlook:
http://www.msoutlook.info/question/303

Dave Rado

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Oct 17, 2012, 1:07:16 PM10/17/12
to
Windows Live Mail, as I have stated several times in this thread, is one
of the most horrible applications I have ever encountered.

Dave Rado

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Oct 17, 2012, 1:07:39 PM10/17/12
to
I do not want to use Outlook.

Dave Rado

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Oct 17, 2012, 1:10:04 PM10/17/12
to
On 02/10/2012 11:39, Dave Rado wrote:
> I recently moved to TB from OE, and one thing about the email client
> puzzles and irritates me.
>
> In OE if an attempt to send an email failed, the email would sit in my
> email Outbox and OE would periodically try to resend it automatically,
> until it succeeded. I could just forget about it and leave it to OE.
>
> But for some weird reason, while I have an Outbox under "Local Folders",
> I don't have one under my email account. If I explicitly select "Work
> offline", my emails go into the Outbox under "Local Folders", but if I'm
> working online and my email provider's SMTP server just happens to be
> playing up and timing out, which it does from time to time, the emails
> I'm trying to send don't go into any Outbox, they just sit in my drafts
> folder. So I have to keep *manually* trying to resend them until the
> SMTP server comes back up, it doesn't retry automatically, which is
> infuriating and quite time-consuming.
>
>
> Is there any workaround for this problem?
>
> Dave

There is an add-on that does exactly what I have been asking for. It is
called BlunderDelay and it flushes entire outbox at regular intervals.
It is available to download at http://bit.ly/WzWomu. I don't understand
why no one apparently knows about it.

Dave Rado

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Oct 17, 2012, 1:13:40 PM10/17/12
to
As I've now found an add-on that flushes the outbox periodically (see my
separate post about it), which is what I've been asking how to do all
along, I won't be spending any more time on this, but thanks for your
suggestions.

Dave

Ron Hunter

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Oct 17, 2012, 3:41:44 PM10/17/12
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It wouldn't be so bad if it didn't keep trying to get you to add this,
that, and the other to your system until it had taken over every aspect
of your computing life!
It's like creeping socialism.

Robert Miles

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Nov 24, 2012, 12:49:18 AM11/24/12
to
On 10/2/2012 9:34 AM, Dave Rado wrote:
> On 02/10/2012 14:51, MikeR wrote:
>> On 10/2/12 9:47 AM, Dave Rado wrote:
>>> On 02/10/2012 13:32, Jay Garcia wrote:
>>>> If mail is waiting to send after you click "Send", the mailbox "Unsent
>>>> Messages" is auto-created until you chose to File => Send Unsent
>>>> Messages
>>>
>>> That doesn't happen to me. The email just remains open, and if I close
>>> and save it, it sits in my drafts folder. How can I make it behave as
>>> you describe?
>>>
>>> Dave
>> Mine go to the "Drafts" folder. See "Account settings-->Copies & folders"
>
> In Account Settings > Copies and Folders I can't see anything relating
> to messages that have failed to be sent.

I suspect that you have to change some setting related to working
offline before you will see any folder for Unsent Messages, and even
then, see it only if it contains at least one message.
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