SOLVED: Outlook – The Operation Cannot Be Performed Because the Message has Been Changed

If you’re trying to send a e-mail message in Microsoft Outlook and you receive a pop up error that says The operation cannot be performed because the message has been changed, you likely have one of two issues.

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WORKING FROM A DRAFT:

If you tried to pick up where you left off writing an e-mail message, it’s likely been saved as a draft automatically in the background. If something has changed with that draft that is different from the version you are working on “The operation cannot be performed because the message has changed been changed” pop up will occur.

There are several ways around this but what we normally do is simply:

1. copy the relevant part of the e-mail that we were writing
2. close the e-mail message that we were working on
3. go into our Drafts folder in Outlook and double click on the email in question (to put it into edit mode)
4. paste the text from the message we were just working on into it
5. click SEND

PROBLEMATIC PLUGIN:

The second issue is that you may have a plug in or third party add in that is experiencing problems. To resolve this go into your Outlook and click the FILE menu in the top left hand corner, then OPTIONS > Options > Add-Ins > Go and uncheck any add-ins that you really don’t need or that you suspect may be problem (i.e. Adobe Send & Track, Skype Meeting, Outlook Social Connector…

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This screenshot shows you how to enable or disable Outlook Plugins

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