So you’ve just performed the Windows 10 Upgrade and everything’s looking good. The operating system appears to be functioning fine and all your applications and data appear to have migrated over just fine – hallelujah, time to get back to work and enjoy all the productivity benefits Windows 10 has to offer. You open up Outlook to start your business-as-usual activities, only to find you’re unable to send an email; instead getting the following error message:
Error message: ‘Techzilla – Sending’ reported error (0x800CCC13): ‘Cannot connect to the network. Verify your network connection or modem.’
When you take a look at all the mail server settings however, they are all correct. You can even successfully send the test message. Recreating the data file and recreating the profile prove futile, likewise repairing the Office installation.
This issue seems to be common for some specific configurations and although the actual cause isn’t clear at this point, it can happen with any version of Outlook – in our scenario it occurred with Outlook 2010.
Thankfully, recovering from this is relatively easy and here’s how.
Windows Resource Checker – sfc /scannow
To recover from the issue, you must run the Microsoft Windows Resource Checker tool, also know as “System File Checker” or “sfc” for short. This tool scans and verifies the integrity of all protected system files and replaces incorrect versions with correct versions:
- Right click on the Start button and select Command Prompt (Admin) or Windows PowerShell (Admin)
- Within the prompt type the following command:
sfc /scannow - Wait until the process completes (this can take a while depending on the speed of your hard disk and PC)
- Restart the device
This command basically puts back some critical Office files to where they needed to be after performing the upgrade to Windows 10 – after allowing the process to complete and rebooting the device you should be able to simply re-open Outlook (no need to recreate data files or profiles) and start sending mail.