Outlook 2010

Need some help!!!!!

A friend of mine has a business email account and accesses it 3 ways, laptop using Outlook 2010, a smartphone & a tablet. After the first of the month none of these would download any emails.

I have been busy so I was unable to get there until today. The first thing I checked was the laptop, I checked the account settings in Outlook, the account type was no longer POP3, it had changed to an IMAP account. I attempted to change it back but the dropdown window would not dropdown.

Next, I checked the smartphone, same issue. I have yet to get to the tablet but I assume the same thing has happened.

I am certain that my friend changed nothing on any of the equipment, has anyone heard of the accounts changing on their own? Could this be some sort of virus or malware? Could it infect all three?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanking you in advance

 

IMAP of course is ideal if you download mail from multiple clients. But I think the server account must also be set up as an IMAP account.

I don't know why you cannot change the Outlook account back to POP3; delete the account and create a new POP3 account.

 

Thanks for your reply:

Did that but now I have new issues, the new account created was named the same as the old, that caused a new issue; the new account now has (1) after it. Everything seemed fine until it downloaded from the server. The inbox shows 210 unread messages and there are none shown. I have searched for them using the search box using: read:no and nothing shows up.

What I am thinking of doing is to create a new account using one of my email addresses and deleting her account completely then create it again which should get rid of the (1) at the end.

Your thoughts?

Thanking you in advance

Crapgame

 

My first thought is that the account was probably set up as IMAP deliberately. POP is unsuitable where multiple email clients are present, as here, because the first device to read a message will remove it from the server, so the inbox gets fragmented across the various devices.

So I would start by setting up a new IMAP account on each of the devices. All of them should then be able to access all messages and order should be restored. There will be an issue over any messages downloaded to the POP account you created as they will no longer be accessible by either of the other two devices.

 

Thanks for your reply:

These were set up as POP3, the server requires it (unable to determine exactly why, the IT guy that set it up many years ago will not return calls, texts or emails). All of the other email accounts on other computers are set as POP3s.

I used one of my email addresses, set it up in her Outlook program, deleted her account then set it up again. I used the auto setup therefore it created a new PST file (at first I attempted to set it up manually but was unable to get connected to the server due to a Login Information: User Name or Password problem).

I added her old \ existing PST file to the Data File list and selected it as the default. Outlook downloaded 144 new messages, the inbox shows 144 unopened messages but they appear nowhere (they may be in the new PST file).

At this point I am pulling what little hair I have left out by the roots.


Thanking you in advance

Crapgame

 

Sorry but I just don't accept that three separate and technically different devices have somehow had their email setups changed by a force unknown from POP to IMAP. It is beyond credibility. For the reason I have given it is also completely impractical to be attempting to run a business, accessing emails from laptop, tablet or phone when using POP. Furthermore, I know of no ISP that offers a POP email service that does not also offer IMAP as an alternative.

You need to revert all three devices' email accounts to IMAP and if there is still a problem accessing emails then it has some other cause that we need to track down.

 

Alternative ways around this could be to open a gmail account and set it to pull all messages off the ISP's server. Then access the gmail account from any device in a web browser or, if the ISP provides a webmail service, simply use that. Email clients such as Outlook are making this unnecessarily complicated, though if you adopt the gmail suggestion you could set it up in Outlook on the laptop as an IMAP account.

 

Thanks for your assistance!

Basically I agree, not possible that all three devices were changed by some outside source….but the owner states that she changed nothing on any of the three.

I solved the problem with the laptop, purged all accounts and data files (shut Outlook down and deleted the data files via Explorer) from Outlook, created a new account and imported the old PST file into the new one. Took almost an hour (5G PST file).

Outlook is working now, it was able to download all the emails from the first of the month until now.

Phone and tablet tomorrow.

Thanks again for the assistance:

Crapgame

 

OK, pleased you managed to crack the d/load issue, and thanks for the feedback. But the basic problem remains that using POP the messages are going to be scattered across the three devices, no one device being able to see all of them. Maybe your friend would like to hear about better ways of working