How does Outlook hanlde interrupted attachment uploads?

[PPettit]

I've got a user that works in remote areas where there may be little or no Internet service. His procedures include generating a couple of files that need to be sent back to the office at some point. The size of each email is somewhere around 3MB and will probably be sent via Outlook 2010. If he's able to get an Internet connection at all, it's probably going to be slow. If he needs to move on to the next location before the upload is finished, what can I expect if he loses his connection or turns off his laptop? Will Outlook just try to send the message again the next time he has a connection, or will it corrupt the message and prevent it from being sent again?

Anyone have other suggestions on how to handle this situation?

 

[ChrisHirst]

It won't resume where resume where it left off, if that's what you were thinking.

It should just retry the whole thing again when next connected, but Outlook being MS the latter is probably most likely to be the case.

It might be worth looking into using the BitTorrent protocol so each time that user has a connection the pieces start uploading

Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Time flies like an arrow, however, fruit flies like a banana.
Webmaster Forum

 

[PPettit]

Thanks for the reply. Yeah, I was pretty sure that Outlook wouldn't resume an interrupted transfer. I just have memories of older versions of Outlook corrupting aborted uploads and was wondering if the newer versions were any better. After getting my hands on the machine, I discovered that he's using the Windows Live Mail client, not Outlook. My guess is that the functionality is basically the same when it comes to uploads.

It looks like there may also be a problem with how Live Mail determines that a message has been successfully sent. I was told that even though the messages are in the Sent folder, the recipients claim that they've never received them. On the other hand, there may be an issue that occurs after the message has been sent that causes the message to be undelivered. Our mail host gets blacklisted every now and then, so the messages might be getting sent to a black hole server at some point.

I may just do like you've suggested and implement something along the lines of BitTorrent or DropBox.

 

[jlockley]

Have you considered providing him with something like Dropbox?