Over the last couple of days I have had a strange problem with email.

I am using outlook express and it all started when my PC crashed and I had an email open, once the PC restarted the email was nowhere to be seen!

And again today, I had 3 emails and all of a sudden after closing OE and the opening it again those mails are non existant.

Anyone have any ideas what could be causing this? its like the my PC clock time is 2 hours slower than the time the server said the emails were received so they can't possibly have arrived yet, or something or nothing like that.

ARGHHHHHHHH!!

if your pc tells the server it has successfully downloaded them they will be deleted form the server (thats how pop3 works), so if your pc tells the server it has it then crashes and looses it itself then it wont be there to download again. Another option would be to change you settings in oe to stop it deleted straight away (i believe there is a setting for delete when 3 days old or only when moved to deleted items folder etc.

I understand about the emails being removed from the server, and yes the email will have been deleted, but why does it completly vanish if I read it, maybe OE got borked after the crash?

If they were important:-

http://www.whitecanyon.com/recover-outlook-express-email.php

I use Mozilla Thunderbird instead and haven't lost an email yet. I have the profiles backed up to the server and I have an email archive from pretty much when I started using email clients. I have also always had the settings so that the message is on the server for 7 days after initially downloading it.

Not that any of that helps you know, but if you don't already I'd get some sort of backup system in place as you're PC is pretty much knackered as there's always something not quite right on it.

Thunderbird rools

As does Firefox, and all them add ons

cheers

Incredimail..... It works well and you can send pretty backgrounds. Coool!

Thanks for the replys

I think the obvious solution is get a new PC and use Firefor and Thunderbird

Im still having loads of speed problems with thunderbird but I still think it miles ahead of outlook, I especially like the spam filter I get around 300 mails a day, and at most 30 are real mails and 20 of those are still junk from sites I subscribe ebay etc.

The filter lets you see them but bulk delete them, so you dont delete good mails accidentaly.

Pete

that is ofcourse good but i am afraid it isn't exactly what lurch meant as solution (or your computer being the root of the problem) ..

i might be lost in translation again but i think the backup system is your best guarantee.

yeah, I need to sort out a decent system, backup and network.

This PC does cause problems, I do back everything up often, but it would be nice to automate it and have a purpose backup machine.

www.acronis.com  ?

looks a good idea roger, dont suppose there is an open source free system thats similar, thats about £500.

Acronis is unnecesary, I generally change things between installs anyway so I'd end up with stacks of images that are never used.

All you need is some sort of automated backup to a remote drive, whether that's a NAS box (PC running something like FreeNAS) or just a NAS device (Buffalo Linkstation or similar) there is software that will do the job FOC.

First couple that spring to mind are the inbuilt thing in XP (that really wound me up so I turned it off and had the server drag the info off the machines nightly). I had everything important that I wanted to keep in the My Documents folder, which I had mapped to a network drive. XP synchronises this folder once you move it. I only found out by accident so never played with it too much.

The other way is MS Synctoy.

I use Acronis on my laptop. About £25 for single machine. Grat product, does both disc image and backups, incremental and differential too. You can even retrieve single files from the Disc images.