Hotmail problem – Can’t send email

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Sending emails from your Hotmail account is quite a simple affair. Having said that, a few times each week I get an email from a reader who complains of not being able to send emails from the service. Can’t send emails from Hotmail problem comes second only to Hotmail sign in difficulties. On this page I shall help troubleshoot this issue and hope to provide an answer which works for you.

Are you composing the email properly and is the address correct?

First things first – I hope you know how to compose and send emails from Hotmail. Secondly, make sure the address to which you are sending to is correct. You can make assurance doubly sure by contacting the recipient. Messages sent to nonexistent accounts will result in the email bouncing back – returned to sender!

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Email file attachments problem

At the time of writing, Hotmail lets you send email attachments of upto 10MB (free accounts). Are you trying to attach a file that’s too large? Also, Hotmail may not send emails with files attachments that it thinks can harm its servers or the recipient’s computer. Try sending the message without the attachment and see if it goes through.

You may also be interested in knowing how to attach a large file to an email message.

Browser support

If the email composition window doesn’t open, the browser you are working on is probably not supported by Hotmail. In this case, use another web browser – there are tens of these programs available for free – check the browser list. The technology behind Hotmail may not work with newly released browsers (has happened before) and really old ones.

A case in point is issue faced by Firefox users who find that Hotmail is not attaching the original message to forwards and replies.

Surpassed the limit set by Hotmail

Hotmail would also not send emails if you have surpassed the limit of outgoing messages set by the service. This problem is typically encountered by prolific Hotmail users. Why is an email sending limit set on Hotmail accounts? So that people (the bad ones) do not abuse the system. All online email services are known to be plagued with spammers – people who send tens of hundreds (millions?) of unsolicited messages. Hotmail has an automatic check and if your account triggers it, you would not be able to send emails.

Problem in sending email from a new Hotmail email account

Taking the above point forward, to protect itself from spammers, Hotmail sets a lower limit of sending email messages from new accounts. This limit is gradually increased (probably automatically) as time passes. So if you have sent a whole bunch of emails the day you created the account, Hotmail will most likely not understand that you’ve done is out of excitement; it’s going to think you are a spammer and abusing the service.

New users may also need to go through the Windows Live Hotmail email verification process. This is simply to ensure that the address is being operated by a human and not by a spambot and will stop Hotmail from asking you to verify the account each time.

Hotmail account blocked from send email?

A Hotmail account can be blocked from sending email if the system believes that the subscriber has behaved like a spammer! So if you get a ‘This account is currently blocked from sending messages‘, please read that article to know more and to get the issue sorted out with Hotmail staff.

Account closed

An account closed message is displayed for the same reason – sending more emails in a day than the limit. You can always contact Hotmail support via abuse@hotmail.com email address – which is kind of ironic because if you can’t send emails, how can you send one to the support department? And this brings up the important requirement of having multiple email accounts.
Also, though there is a Hotmail phone number (customer service), I suggest you post a complaint at the Windows Live Solutions Center (WLSC) web site.

By the way, since no real human being is actually monitoring your account – it’s all automatic – you may have accidentally triggered off the limit check. These false alerts should be taken with a pinch of salt (as long as you know you aren’t guilty of misusing the service). You can either send an message to the Hotmail staff at the above mentioned email address or visit WLSC.

If everything fails and you still can’t send emails from Hotmail – well, your guess is as good as mine. Try sending the email from another account. You can always get a Gmail account for free which works quite like a Hotmail account.

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