Solved Windows 11 Mail - emails not being sent

[This on is for my neighbour who has just got an HP All-in-one PC)

Windows Mail is set up and a User Account has been created. Emails can be received. But when an email is created (or an incoming email is replied to) and [Send] is clicked, the email is closed but it does not appear in the Sent folder and is not received by the recipient. I thought that it might be in the Outbox but cannot find that folder.

There is a draft in the Drafts folder but it only contains the sender's email address, No recipient, title or contents.

How can we trouble-shoot this?

And, can you recommend alternative, working email clients?

Has the 'Outgoing Server (SMTP)' been set up correctly? For Gmail this would show as smtp.gmail.com

An alternative email client is Mozilla Thunderbird, which is free and very easy to set up. It is a very highly rated product but, like any other program/app out there, there are always people who can find something wrong with it and suggest another product. I have used it for years with no problems and I have no vested interest in suggesting it. Do your research and take your pick.

DarkStar said:

... when an email is created (or an incoming email is replied to) and [Send] is clicked, the email is closed but it does not appear in the Sent folder and is not received by the recipient. I thought that it might be in the Outbox but cannot find that folder.

Click to expand...

If you click the folder con just above the icon that looks like a snail-mail envelope, that should open the menu of folders, with Outbox at the top. If your friend doesn't have an outbox in that menu, maybe it would be a good move to uninstall and re-install Windows Mail.

When such a problem occurs, as @wikangen stated, it is a configuration settings with the server and/or port used.
You say Windoxs mail, so I included those, you can disregard MSN.

Thank you all. I did see in "Windows 10 in Depth" (the authors have not written a W11 edition), that setting up Mail can fail and you need to use the Advanced Settings option. I shall investigate. For info, the email provider is plus.net (part of BT), here in the UK.

I also saw, on the Interwebz, that Mail does not store emails in local folders but is merely a front -end ("thin client", browser) to whichever server provides your email account. Is this correct? If not, where would I find the folders? I did a Search of the C: drive for "mail" but did not find anything relevant.

Unless you use Outlook, the program, from Microsoft 365 and a POP server, you wouldn't get a local .pst file.
Nowadays because users have multiple devices ,IMAP is used as it would not be efficient to store
the content locally on each device.
For most providers, without the old Exchange type servers, the content remains in the cloud, and not locally.
This said, indexes of emails and some content are stored locally in proprietary database format such as .msf files for Thunderbird.
You would find those files in %appdata%\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\profileName
under an \ImapMail folder.

plusnet email settings

oops, never noticed the date, will probably be fixed by now