Outlook send button is gone? Here’s the fix.

Last Updated on March 4, 2017 by Dave Farquhar

“My Outlook send button is gone,” one of my coworkers told me. Microsoft wasn’t much help. The relevant knowledge base articles said the e-mail account not being configured causes that problem. Except it was. He could receive and read mail just fine, he just couldn’t send anything out.

Ultimately we ended up deleting his mail profile to fix the missing send button.

Before you do this, I suggest backing up your mail into a PST just in case. It’s possible to lose your sent items, and perhaps other things, when you rebuild your mail profile.

Go to File, New, Outlook Data File. Select the first option, click OK, give it a filename, then click OK. The PST file you just created will show up in your mail folders, probably under the label Personal Folders. Copy your sent items, inbox and anything else that seems important into that hierarchy.

Now, rebuild the profile. Click Start, go into Control Panel, click Mail, and click Show Profiles. Select the existing profile, click Delete, then create a new one. Close Outlook, then restart it. Outlook will connect to the Exchange server and re-create the local cached copy of everything. Now when you create a new message or reply, the send button will be back.

Something went wrong in his local e-mail profile. Don’t ask why or how. Exchange and Outlook still do unpredictable things sometimes, even after all these years.

Based on the existence of knowledge base articles that give the same advice that doesn’t work, it looks like this happens with almost any Outlook version, from 2003 to 2007 to at least 2010.

If you have a missing send button in Outlook, try rebuilding the mail profile. Chances are it will work as well for you as it did for us. Good luck.

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