After an automatic install of IE 11 via Windows Update I found two Outlook 2003 (SP3) installs on two different machines facing the following problem:
Changes to drafts would no longer save, also Outlook 2003 would not prompt if the existing, editied draft should be saved. Only applies to HTML emails, RTF and plain-text mails not affected.
Outlook version: 11.8330.8405 SP3
Windows version: Windows 7 Professional, Version 6.1 Build 7601: SP1;
One machine: 32bit; one machine x64 - both facing the same problem.
Not using Exchange but regular POP3/SMTP accounts.
How to recreate (problem occurs 90% of the time, but rarely it did work for no particular reason):
- Create a draft (new mail, answer, forward) and put some text in it.
- Close & save draft.
- Goto draft folder, open draft, edit it. Close - Outlook does not prompt if you want to save the changes.
- Reopen draft - changes are lost. Saving the changes manually doesn't work - nothing happens.
The problem was resolved after uninstalling IE11 and reverting back to IE10.
As Outlook does use IE libraries to process (and obviously also to create) HTML, some updates to the IE libraries coming with IE11 clearly cause undesired behaviour with Outlook 2003.
I am very aware that Office 2003 is ten years old, however, an updated Internet Explorer must not break a working Outlook install - I cannot afford to buy a new Office Suite every time a new IE comes out.
Best regards
