Help please! Email gone bonkers!

My email has just started receiving EVERY single email I have ever deleted (sent and received) since 2006... There are thousands

I'm on XP, is it anything to do with Windows XP support ending on April 8th maybe? Anyone else having this problem?

Any advice very gratefully received, thank you

reply to post by paradisepurple


OMG id go into meltdown ! ive no heard anyone say the same thing......hope you get it resolved ! someone on here will have the answer

Just a guess, but it sounds like you probably have your email client set to POP3 and you also have it set up to leave a copy of messages on the server (as opposed to deleting them when you download them). If this is the case, it's quite possible that your email client has somehow lost the information on what messages it has already downloaded and is busy doing what it thinks it needs to do - downloading all the messages it doesn't think it has downloaded yet.

There really isn't much of a solution to stop it now other than possibly logging into a web portal for your email (if there is one available) and delete a bunch of your old messages. To prevent this from happening again, you should set your email client to either delete messages as they are downloaded or delete them on the server once you delete them on your local machine.

Good luck!

reply to post by gabrielswings


Meltdown in progress! I have an OCD about deleting emails anyway, hate clutter, frankly this is my worst email nightmare come true

It's a trip down memory lane glancing through them but I'm so worried it's a virus!

reply to post by paradisepurple


I know you always worry that youve been caught out on something nasty , why dont you consider opening a new email address ? i know your system is an older one but maybe its worth a try, i think anything valuable you have transfer it to the new email address ....just a thought......let me know how you get on !

GMan420
There really isn't much of a solution to stop it now other than possibly logging into a web portal for your email (if there is one available) and delete a bunch of your old messages. To prevent this from happening again, you should set your email client to either delete messages as they are downloaded or delete them on the server once you delete them on your local machine.

Good luck!

Thank you! I have no idea if there is a web portal available for my email, where might I find that?

Emails are now numbering the 4590 mark, nooooo! And they're on September 2010, another 3 years to go...! Surely it will get full at some point and refuse to receive any more..?

paradisepurple

GMan420
There really isn't much of a solution to stop it now other than possibly logging into a web portal for your email (if there is one available) and delete a bunch of your old messages. To prevent this from happening again, you should set your email client to either delete messages as they are downloaded or delete them on the server once you delete them on your local machine.

Good luck!

Thank you! I have no idea if there is a web portal available for my email, where might I find that?

Emails are now numbering the 4590 mark, nooooo!

Who is your email provider? If it's Google ([email protected]), you can go to mail.google.com or www.gmail.com. If it's a hotmail address you can go to hotmail.com. If it's yahoo, you can go to mail.yahoo.com. Most major providers give web portal access to their email with the mail.providername.com format. Or if yours isn't one of the major providers, you could Google your mail provider and then add "web portal" to the search (eg if your provider was AOL, you could Google "aol email web portal").

Additionally, I wouldn't worry about this behavior coming from a virus but if you are concerned that you've gotten a virus, I would suggest installing and scanning with MalwareBytes.

You can log into your WEB MAIL account and delete the old messages. I bet your mail provider would appreciate it.

As for the cause, mail might have been set to IMAP and recently changed to POP3. In IMAP, your mail is saved on the server and you have mirrored mail on the local account. Great if you change machines often. POP3 you download from server to the local machine and the server doesn't save accessible mail after download. (unless you specify otherwise)

But you don't need to know the tech version, just log into webmail and clear out your mess.