Outlook Express 6 - "No sender is specified" error - but only on imported messages

When I try to send certain emails, I get the error:
"The message could not be sent. No sender is specified. Please check your
News Account configuration."

Attempts to save these messages in the Drafts folder also fail.

Now I know the obvious way to fix this would be just to go into the Account
properties, and ensure the Name and Email entries are correct. But this has
already been done, and does not appear to be the problem.

Now what makes this error strange is that it only occurs with certain emails
and not others.

Basially, a few days ago, I reinstalled XP. And I had to save all my email
folders to another HD and then re-import them later.

Now this problem *only* occurs if I attempt to forward or reply to one of
the earlier emails that had to be imported.

All new emails created or received since the re-install function fine.

Does anyone have any idea how to fix this?

Thanks in advance,
Reilly

 

Yeah start using thunderbird and give on this crappy OE

 

Too many experts with too many soapbox'es.

 

And your point being?

 

I think I can work around it.

No matter how many email accounts OE has and no matter which email
account is the default one, when OE receives a mail and replies to the
received mail, the account which is configured to be the sender is the
account which received the mail.

Perhaps you can see where this is going.

If there is no such thing as the account which received the mail in the
configuration of the 'person' or identity or account which is trying to
reply to the mail, then the 'standard' behavior of OE isn't going to
work. There isn't a 'sender' by that scenario.

So if you were trying to work around the problem, and you wanted a mail
which you were replying to have the same subject and you also wanted to
cite certain parts of the mail you received, you would have to do the
following....

- begin to answer the received mail, using its subject and attribution
and cited text so as to create the body of the mail you want to send so
that you have a mail with a subject and body that you want
- leave that task and start a new task
- the new task is a newmail addressed to the sender of the mail which
you are replying and this newmail will have a sender, namely the default
mail account's sender
- that newmail needs a subject which can be copied from the preceding
reply mail task and you should also copy and paste the body of the
previous mail into the body of the newmail
- now you can send the newmail, composed of parts of the old mail and
the sender part of the newmail
- there may be other ways to get your problem reconfigured, but I'm not
clear on what strange construction you created when you did your
importing business

That method is a workaround, not a fullblown solution.

 

To many users blinded by Microsoft and having extraneous apostrophes to
misuse.

 

He only knows MS programs.

 

Such a shame.

 

Thanks Mike. The above is essentially what I was forced to do.

My importing was just done manually by myself and not using any type of
backup program.

- I saved all the dbx files for my folders and placed them on another HD.
- On the new installation of Outlook Express, I created the folders in OE,
opened each one once (to force the program to create a matching .dbx file).
- Then copied all the backed-up dbx files and over-wrote the new(empty)
ones.

It all seemed to work as normal and expected. All the old emails are
accessible and readable.

This "No sender" error, plus the inability to save them as Drafts, is the
only sign of their being a problem.

Does this method indicate a solution?

Thank you in advance,
Reilly

 

..dbx files are (simply) a proprietary compression of a folderfile of the
mbox format of a mail or news message. The folder.dbx file is an
important integral to that.

I would have done that by importing the messages. OE/ File/ Import/
Messages - select OE6 messages - then select import from store folder.
However, I'm not 100% sure that would have averted the problem.

Let me describe a scenario. I have 2 accounts at myisp.com, [email protected]
and [email protected] and I have a gmail account [email protected] and let my
default OE account be user1 and let gmail forward user3 to user2. So,
if I create a newmail, its sender is user1 because that is the default
account. If I want its sender to be user2, I need to set that as the
default account.

If someone emails user3 which gets forwarded into user2 and I answer
that mail, then the sender will not be user3 in the To, nor will it be
user1 the default mail account, but it will be user2 the account in OE
which received the mail.

When you perform your population of your folders by matching their names
with the names of the .dbx files, that doesn't satisfy the problem of
which account received the mail -- if you see what I mean. That is, as
far as these 'folders' go, the nature of their creation isn't the same
as what those .dbx files represent.

I just think that those folders which you created aren't associated with
an email account in the same way they would have been in their old
environment, and I'm not sure whether or not the importing process will
solve the problem. The importation is the 'right' way to get the
messages into the new structure, not by just copying the files into the
new structure's store folder.

 

In my OE, I have a lot of accounts and folders. A really lot. In every
folder's view, one of the columns is 'account'.

Every single item in every single folder, whether incoming or
outgoing/sent, has a 'value' in that account field. If it is a news
message I sent, then its account is the newsserver's account's name
which I sent it to. If it is a mailmessage I sent, then its account is
the mail account which I used. Similarly, if it is a mail message I
received, then its account is the mail account which received it.

I suspect that the method you used to populate your folders did not
result in a proper account value in that field. I suspect, but I'm not
sure how that value could be populated by your method.

 

Hi Mike,
This is belated but I thought I should give a report, so as to help anybody
googling for this problem/solution in the future.

Basically, I used this method below and it worked successfully.

"B. Your current Identity may be damaged, especially if its the default Main
Identity. Try one or more of your mail & news accounts in a new Named
Identity (File > Identities > Add new identity). Assuming all is well, (1)
compact all folders in the old identity, (2) import messages from the old
identity into the new one, and then (3) delete the old one (File >
Identities > Manage Identities)."

One thing that confused me about this problem was that I had performed my
manual method of backup several times in the past with zero problems.

After thinking about it awhile, I realized their was one difference. The
XP usernames in the two installations were slightly different - for example
of the form, "Reillyextra" on the old installation, and just "Reilly" on the
new one.

Thus, the resultant address books had slightly different filenames too:
"reillyextra.wab" , "reilly.wab" . My manual method of importing messages
involved copying/renaming the dbx files. But unlike previous times, this
time I also had to rename the .wab file.

I do not know if these differing XP usernames was the cause of the problem,
but it is the only thing that appears to differ from any of my previous
(successful) backup/restore operations.

You were spot on when you said the importation was the right way, rather
than just copying the store files. From now on, I'll just use the internal
'import' functions that you refer to provided by OE rather than do it
manually myself.

Thanks for the help,
Reilly