Outlook MacOS - Downloading Attachments from the Server (Nonfunctional)

Anonymous
2024-05-11T10:01:53+00:00

Good day,

I'm reaching out for help with an ongoing issue I'm experiencing with my email accounts on Outlook. Two days ago, all of my accounts suddenly stopped being able to send or receive emails. This issue appeared out of nowhere and has since become a constant problem.

I've tried removing and re-adding the accounts, but this hasn't resolved the issue. Now, my emails won't fully load, and I consistently see a "Downloading Attachments from Server..." message in the reading pane that never progresses. Additionally, the email previews are not showing up.
I have also deleted Outlook entirely and re-installed it but that also did not work.

Interestingly, these email accounts work perfectly on other mail clients like Mail on Mac and RoundCube. In Outlook, however, emails are not sent or received, and test emails remain stuck in the Outbox.

Please note, these are IMAP email accounts.

I have already reached out to the domain hosting providers, but they were unable to assist. If anyone has encountered a similar issue or has any suggestions on how to resolve it, your advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Also, I tried to attach a screenshot, but it seems as if everything is broken because the file fails to upload.

Kind regards,

D

System Information:

Macbook Air M1

MacOS Sonoma 14.4.1
Office 365
Outlook Downloaded from App Store

Outlook | MacOS | Legacy Outlook for Mac | For business

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.

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  1. Anonymous
    2024-11-15T01:35:09+00:00

    This is a constant battle. MS needs to replace all engineers working on MacOS Outlook. It is just not getting better.

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  2. Anonymous
    2024-08-27T08:00:22+00:00

    I can confirm that changing the Authentication to User name and Password, rather than Use incoming server info indeed seems to - finally - have fixed this issue for me as well. Thanks Darell, for sharing this solution.

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  3. Anonymous
    2024-06-21T11:11:44+00:00

    Hi there

    I am also having this issue, but only on my Macbook (which is new) - the account in question still works fine on my iMac desktop?

    It is driving me slightly nuts, every time I think I have fixed it, it turns out the issue is still there. Has Microsoft got a solution please?

    Thank you

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  4. Anonymous
    2024-05-14T07:09:21+00:00

    Hi,

    I am having the same issue today with my account, which is an Office365 account, not IMAP, Using Outlook 16.84.2 on an M1 MacBook Pro running MacOS 12.7.4.

    One specific email in my inbox is stuck showing 'Downloading attachments from server' at the top of the preview pane. The email content is showing in the preview pane but the reply and forward buttons are greyed out for this email. I can reply to other emails.

    However, after reading this thread I checked and I now realise that all mail sent from this account since yesterday has been stuck in my outbox and not sent, and any new mail I send also gets stuck - even though there is no obvious indication that anything has gone wrong at the time of sending, it just pops up the 'Sending' notification as normal that then disappears.

    It is unacceptable for a system I rely on for work for it to silently fail to send mail.

    It seems that the account is working with Apple's mail client on my iPhone - I can send mail successfully from there. It's also apparent from there that other things I have done recently like moving emails to different folders have not been synced from my Mac Outlook client either, as they still appear in the Inbox on my phone. Similarly, the 4 emails in the Outbox on my Outlook client are not showing in the Outbox on the phone, so I have no way to force them to send.

    Update:

    I have resolved this for the time being by:

    • Using Apple Mail on my Mac and connecting that to my exchange account
    • Manually re-creating the emails stuck in the outbox in Outlook by copying the content across to new mails in Apple Mail (along with apologies to all the recipients for the late replies) and sending from there
    • Deleting all the mails in the outbox in Outlook
    • Deleting my account from Outlook
    • Restarting Outlook
    • Adding the account back to Outlook

    I can now send emails again from this account in Outlook. The email that had the 'Downloading attachments from server' message previously now appears to be fine.

    I am nervous that the problem may recur so I'm just going to have to keep an eye on the outbox and check every sent mail has actually sent. It's strange because it's not like it had completely stopped syncing - it was still receiving incoming mails, it was just sending mail or moving mails from one folder to another that was not syncing, so it was really not obvious that anything was wrong.

    Frustrating to have wasted an afternoon on this and I assume the underlying issue is not fixed so there's probably more wasted time to come.

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  5. Anonymous
    2024-05-12T04:20:05+00:00

    Do any messages load?

    Did you try making a new profile? Microsoft has instructions in this article - https://support.microsoft.com/office/manage-profiles-or-identities-in-outlook-for-mac-fed2a955-74df-4a24-bef6-78a426958c4c

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