Clients Using Outlook Sending Multiple Copies

[Vibe]

Hi everyone,

I have been pulling out my hair today and am hoping that somebody has experienced the same issue that I am working with - thank you tremendously in advance!

Around 9:30 AM today I started receiving phone calls & emails from clients telling me that when they send email using Outlook (non-Exchange) - several of their recipients receive up to 15 duplicate messages. I have researched all day and have found suggestions that issues like this might result from Norton anti-virus and/or enabling the saving of messages on the server. However, I find this rather odd as this just cropped up today.

The *only* changes we have made on the system (other than a new motherboard on Wednesday - yeah... it has been one of "those" weeks) were a few rules in our firewall (IPF on FreeBSD 6.2) to loosen up DNS access. However, for the life of me I cannot imagine this would have any influence.

Has anyone experienced a similar issue?

 

[pot_roast]

Which version of Outlook? Office XP or 2003?

Short answer: Yes, I have seen this behavior in the past. It had absolutely nothing to do with the mail server. Are the Message-ID values the same? Outlook (and I spoke with Microsoft about this) simply has a mind of its own and decides that the mail wasn't sent.

This was using Office XP. Both Outlook and Outlook Express exhibit the same behavior. There are MANY MANY Google results for this issue, but no bona fide solutions. Some blame Norton/Symantec, and say to disable outbound virus scanning. Others have said to apply the Office service packs.

No other email client exhibits this issue.

 

[floyd]

Just to verify it is definitely an Outlook problem and not a server problem. Mail gets stuck in their Outbox.

 

[Vibe]

Hi floyd & pot_roast,

Thanks so much for your replies - they are GREATLY appreciated!

I was about to throw in the towel as this particular server was running me ragged the week that I had this issue. After having to go through a motherboard replacement & repairing MySQL databases for clients due to this machine rebooting (thank the Big Man for FSCK!) - I was absolutely stumped when we started having the Outlook issue. Never had this happened before and of course our first thought with so many other issues was it was something to do with the system.

We only had some 10 - 20 clients call us regarding this issue. We realized that they were all Outlook users (pot_roast - 200, XP and 2003) and some do use Norton Anti-virus.

Then the next day - POOF! - the issue was no more (???).

After reviewing our log files we learned that all duplicate emails were assigned unique ID's so that certainly made us more confident that the system was not the culprit. But the timing! After all of the other issues we were certainly quick to blame it on the server.

The *only* other thing we did was update the resolvers provided by our data center - but I can't imagine this having any influence.

I hope I can safely say this was only a strange, momentary issue. Thanks again to both of you for your comments & suggestions!