Outlook reverts to old draft when sending

[adamthehutt]

Hi,

I've been experiencing a strange but quite serious bug in Outlook 2003 which only started after installing the Zimbra Connector.

Occasionally when I spend a long time writing a message, Outlook reverts to an old saved draft after clicking "Send" and before the message is actually sent. This results in an unfinished (sometimes embarrassingly so) email being sent out instead of the version that existed at the time of sending.

This is hard to reproduce, since it only happens perhaps 1 out of every 2,000 emails sent. My best guess is that there's some kind of narrow timing window, possibly relating to the spell check that it runs before sending. Also (and this could be a red herring), I'm pretty sure it only happens after I've changed the email format from Plain Text to HTML.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

[alee]

Originally Posted by adamthehutt

Hi,

I've been experiencing a strange but quite serious bug in Outlook 2003 which only started after installing the Zimbra Connector.

Occasionally when I spend a long time writing a message, Outlook reverts to an old saved draft after clicking "Send" and before the message is actually sent. This results in an unfinished (sometimes embarrassingly so) email being sent out instead of the version that existed at the time of sending.

This is hard to reproduce, since it only happens perhaps 1 out of every 2,000 emails sent. My best guess is that there's some kind of narrow timing window, possibly relating to the spell check that it runs before sending. Also (and this could be a red herring), I'm pretty sure it only happens after I've changed the email format from Plain Text to HTML.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

when you are modifying the draft in outlook, is it possible that you changed the same draft via the web client or another client?

[adamthehutt]

Nope. I'm not even running the web client.

For now I've turned off autosaving altogether, which I'm hoping might help.

[mmergen]

We also have users that sporadically experience this issue with Outlook sending an earlier draft version of an email rather than the finished version. We are running NE 5.0.9. Users are using the 5.0.9 version of ZCO. Anyone else seeing this or figured out how to correct this issue?

[adamthehutt]

FWIW, I haven't experienced the problem since turning off autosave. It's a shame to lose that feature, though.

[mmergen]

Just found a bugzilla page that looks like it might be related. However the page doesn't mention anything about the old version of the message getting sent. Anyone know if this is that same issue perhaps?

Bug 31672 – Drafts saved in ZWC are not getting updated in ZCO ver 5.0.2706.9

[Jay2k1]

Hi,

one of my customers reports the exact same problem (although she's not sure whether it only happens when switching from plain text to HTML). For her, it happens maybe once every 2-3 weeks or so. She writes a mail and after sending it, she looks at the "sent" folder to be sure the mail has been sent. At this point, she notices that some parts she changed shortly before sending are missing in the sent mail.
This really sucks when you compose longer mails for your clients and, for example, prepare it so you just have to paste a few links into it, and when the mail is finished, you switch to your browser, copy the links, paste them into the mail and then send it - and in the sent version, all the links are missing. And if you don't look at the mail in the sent folder, you wouldn't even notice (until you get a phone call from your client of course).

Turning off the auto save feature in Outlook might sure help, but as her computer or Outlook crashes occasionally, and she is a person that often writes long mails with quite some research being done while she writes it, much work could get lost without that feature, so we wonder if it's worth it.

I take it no progress has been made tracking this down in the past two years?
Is there any information I could provide to help getting this issue solved?

Regards,

Jay

PS: She uses Outlook 2003 with latest MS Updates with Zimbra Outlook Connector 6.0.6_GA_2324_6.0.5902.6 on Windows XP Pro.
Zimbra Version: Release 6.0.6_GA_2324.RHEL5_64_20100406133038 CentOS5_64 NETWORK edition

Edit: Own thoughts: I guess it must be related to the MAPI connector somehow as it doesn't happen without it and the part responsible for sending the mail is Outlook.

Unfortunately I haven't yet found a way to reproduce this behaviour...