I took the somewhat gentle leap from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 across two PCs and a laptop, and the one major issue I faced with one PC only was that I could no longer send any emails that had Outlook 2010 installed. It would give me an error code 0x800CCC13, followed by ‘Task ’email address alias@domain.com- Sending’ Cannot connect to the network. Verify your network connection or modem.’
Replying to an email was fine. Any new email however would just get stuck in the Outgoing folder. The laptop, also with Outlook 2010, was fine.
It didn’t seem to matter which account I used (seeing as I have multiple in the one Outlook client), or if I created a new account, the problem remained the same.
First stop: Google
Of course, all I did at first was go to Google and search for “cannot send email using Outlook on Windows 10” and there I was met with a myriad of Microsoft support pages in the search results.
Now I don’t know if you’ve ever gone looking for an answer on any Microsoft support pages but let me break it down for you: just don’t. It’s an awful experience that will leave you scarred, and repeating the same question and answer over and over (if you’ve been there already, you know what I mean).
They do have damn fine SEO though as although I thought I was being pretty particular, I was getting answers to all sorts of Windows problems that I didn’t have.
Solution found
When searching beyond the Microsoft online help forums I came across a forum I used to use years ago when dealing with Microsoft Exchange issues, and this led me to the solution.
Essentially I needed to open the command prompt as an Administrator (Windows Key + X, then select Command Prompt (Admin)), and then run the following command:
sfc /scannow.
This is the System File Checker and after 10-15min it completed its job, and then let me know that there was some sort of corruption that had now been fixed. As is typical when something like this has been run, I rebooted for good measure.
Starting up Outlook again, I could now send emails once more. I hope this helps anyone in a similar situation.
