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Over the last two years, I have been using Outlook 2013, now Office 365. I've been experiencing an ongoing issue where I receive this message "Operation cannot be performed because message has been changed" message. Typical scenarios: 1) A new email arrives in my Outlook inbox. I preview, or read the email. I attempt to delete the email. Operation cannot... message appears. I either type a new email, or reply to an email, go on to another task leaving the draft until later. When I return to the draft email, complete the email, and attempt to send the email, Operation cannot... message appears. I also cannot even save the draft, same error message. This is the worst part of this bug, as I've wasted/lost the time effort spent on the draft email.
I have run the Office repair utilities. I have tried unchecking the email cleanup boxes, and a variety of fixes recommended on these Microsoft answers communities. I've noticed sometimes when I come back to a message, it does allow me to move/delete the message. It's like there's a sync issue that needs time to resolve. However, nothing appears to work when a draft message gets hung in this loop. I have to start over with a new reply email.
Using Classic Outlook on Windows for personal email, calendar, and contact management
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
That takes time. My method takes less than 5 seconds and can be done without leaving the email you are reading.
Seemed strange that it only occurs occasionally for you - with me it is 80% of all emails refuse to be moved, initially - I wonder why?
I get around this by deleting the email, then going to the Bin, and from there I can do whatever action I need to take. These messages never come up. It's not ideal but it does work every time.
Thank you, will give it a try the next time it happens and report on the results. outlook used to work just fine and I had tons of emails and multiple accounts.
I get this all the time when moving messages into folders. The work around is to go to the menu section 'Tags' at the top of the message and click on the 'Unread/Read' toggle twice in fairly quick succession (not a double-click). Sometimes it doesn't work first time, so try it again.
So simple - takes about two seconds and then it will file. I have no idea why this works, perhaps it triggers some sort of server synchronisation by setting the message to unread and then setting it back again. Once both client and server are are synched - they do not think something has changed.
Cheers,
David Beare
It happens to me in Outlook 2013.