7 Fixes to Try When Outlook Won't Receive New Emails | MakeUseOf

Not seeing the emails that you expect in Outlook on your desktop? If so, Outlook might have an issue that's causing it not to receive new emails.

There are various reasons Outlook won't receive new messages. Luckily, you have several fixes to get around this issue.

Outlook has a spam-filtering option that sends junk and suspicious emails to the Spam folder. This folder is separate from your inbox, so if Outlook marked a legitimate message as spam, it might be sitting inside here.

Luckily, it's easy to move those emails back to the inbox. For the future, you can also instruct Outlook not to mark emails from that particular sender as spam in the future.

You can do this as follows:

1. Launch Outlook and click the Spam option in the left sidebar.
2. You'll see the emails that Outlook has marked as spam. If you found the email that you were expecting here, right-click on it and choose Junk, followed by Not Junk.
3. Before Outlook moves the email back to the inbox, it will ask if you want to always trust emails from that sender. Check the box if you want to do that, then click OK.

If you find any particularly dangerous emails in the Spam folder, you can actually report spam and fraud emails to the authorities.

2. Change Your Email Sorting Options

You can sort your emails using various options in Outlook. If these sorting options are configured so that they don't show the most recent emails at the top, your newly received emails might be mixed in with other messages. This makes you think you aren't receiving any emails at all in Outlook.

A quick and easy way to fix this is to change the email sorting order in Outlook, which you can do as follows:

1. Open Outlook and click Inbox on the left-side pane.
2. Click on the sort by text (which may say By Date or similar) and choose the Date option.
3. At the bottom of the menu, select Newest on Top. You can also use the arrow icon next to the sort selection to change between ascending or descending.

Your recently received emails should now appear at the top of your inbox.

3. Disable Offline Mode in Outlook

Outlook has an option called Work Offline that lets you disconnect from the server when you don't want to receive new emails. If this option is turned on for some reason, that's why you aren't getting new emails.

You can fix this by disabling the offline mode in Outlook as follows:

1. Open Outlook and click on the Send/Receive tab at the top.
2. Click the option that says Work Offline in the Preferences section.

Outlook should now be back online; wait a minute or two for it to fetch new emails for you.

4. Ensure the Sender Is Not in Your Block List

Outlook lets you keep a blocked people list that has all the addresses you don't want to receive emails from. Perhaps your trusted email sender was somehow added to this list, and so their emails are getting rejected.

If this is the case, removing your email sender from the block list should fix the issue. You can do that as follows:

1. Click the Home tab at the top in Outlook and select Junk.
2. Click on Junk E-mail Options from the newly opened menu.
3. Select the tab that says Blocked Senders to view the list of people that you've blocked in Outlook.
4. If the person you're expecting an email from is in the list, click on their name and select Remove. This will remove them from the block list so you can receive their emails.

5. Check Outlook Rules

Rules in Outlook automate many of your email-related tasks. If you have a rule that works with your received emails, it may send your emails to another folder or otherwise make your emails disappear from the inbox.

If you aren't sure, you should check the rules in Outlook and ensure that there's no such rule as described above. In case you find something, you should disable it to fix the issue.

Here's how you access the rules section in Outlook:

1. Click the File tab at the top of your Outlook window.
2. On the Info tab, choose Manage Rules & Alerts on the following screen.
3. Under Email Rules, you'll see all the rules that you've created for your emails. You need to find the rule that modifies your incoming emails and untick the box next to it.

That will disable the rule and your emails should start to appear in your inbox.

6. Clear the Outlook Cache

Like most apps, Outlook saves cache files on your computer to improve performance. These files can sometimes turn out to be the reason you aren't receiving emails in Outlook.

You can try deleting the Outlook cache and see if that helps the app receive new emails. This won't delete any of your Outlook emails or their attachments:

1. Press the Win + R keys to open the Run dialog box.
2. Type the following and hit Enter: %localappdata%\Microsoft\Outlook
3. A File Explorer window will open and you'll see a folder called RoamCache. Open this folder; the Outlook cache files are located there.
4. Select all files in this folder by pressing Ctrl + A. Then right-click on any one file and click Delete (or just hit the Delete key on your keyboard).
5. If this fixed your issue, make sure to delete these files from the Recycle Bin as well to save space.

7. Use a New Outlook Profile

If you still don't receive new emails in Outlook after trying the above, there's probably an issue with your Outlook profile. Outlook profiles can sometimes get corrupted or have another setting change the way they work.

One quick way to get around Outlook profile issues is to discard the old profile and use a new one. This only requires re-configuring your email account and shouldn't take more than a few minutes.

Keep your email account settings handy, as you'll need them in the following steps:

1. Launch Outlook, click the File tab, select Account Settings, and choose Manage Profiles.
2. Click the Show Profiles button to view your Outlook profiles.
3. On the profiles screen, click on Add to add a new Outlook profile.
4. Enter a name for your profile and click OK.
5. Follow the on-screen instructions to add your email account to the newly created profile.
6. Select your newly created profile from the Always use this profile dropdown menu and click Apply followed by OK.
7. Relaunch Outlook to start using your new profile.

If you haven't been receiving your emails in Outlook, the above methods should fix the issue and get Outlook to grab new emails for you.

In case Outlook still won't get new messages, you might want to consider using a free alternative to Outlook, at least temporarily. These are as good as Outlook and in some cases have even better features.