e-mail repeating

[A. Vine]

"Bernard W. Kane" wrote:
>
> May not be relevant to the purposes of the List, but reading Judge Popik's
> complaint from Karlovy Vary that "something's seriously wrong with my AOL
> account, and it's not this Czech keyboard. When I sign in, I get the same
> messages I've already read."
> Question: Any other List members had this experience? I'm not on AOL, but
> frequently get hit with this phenomenon, and my ISP is far from certain
> about what causes it (not fatal, just a nuisance.)
>

Well, depends on the protocol used to retrieve the mail (POP or IMAP usually),
your settings (leave messages on server, download all messages), the settings on
the server, etc.  A couple of things could cause the repeating messages
problem.  If you set the mail in POP to leave messages on the server, then you
will retrieve the messages again until you choose to download them and
essentially remove them from the server.  Another cause is if you download your
messages (again in POP) and don't complete the download, some servers start from
the beginning again - in other words, you have to complete the download for the
batch of messages to be removed from the server.  Still another problem could be
corruption of the message store on an IMAP server, where the messages were
mistakenly marked as unread.  This sort of problem can happen if for some reason
the message store were corrupted and had to be restored from a backup; but it
can also happen from some sort of general corruption.

I don't know if this info is useful, and I'm sure there are other things that
can go wrong which produce the symptom you describe.  The only ones you can
control are the POP download situations.

Andrea