How do you stop old email downloads...

[Stephanie]

I recently had to reset my email acct settings on secondary email addresses
with Cox. Once I completed that process, my Outlook 2007 (not Outlook
Express) starting downloading 4,000+ old email messages related to these
email addresses. I called Cox & they can't help me because it's a Microsoft
Outlook issue. Anyone know how to stop these emails from downloading???

 

[VanguardLH]

I recently had to reset my email acct settings on secondary email addresses
with Cox. Once I completed that process, my Outlook 2007 (not Outlook
Express) starting downloading 4,000+ old email messages related to these
email addresses. I called Cox & they can't help me because it's a Microsoft
Outlook issue. Anyone know how to stop these emails from downloading???

Maybe the "reset" meant the unique ID for each items in your Inbox got
changed. Every e-mail client has to keep track of what it downloaded
before to know what's new when it polls your mailbox. The server won't
know which e-mail client downloaded which item. The e-mail client
tracks that info to know what is old and new as defined by that e-mail
client. So that you are downloading all your old messages again means
that maybe the unique IDs got changed, so now they don't match any that
were downloaded before by that same e-mail client that has been tracking
the old IDs.

So why do you keep 4000+ items in your Inbox folder? Don't you ever
cleanup your mailbox? Since the Inbox folder is the one that changes
most often, and because it can get corrupted due to all the changes and
especially with a ridiculously high number of items (as you have), be
grateful that you haven't lost all of them due to corruption. The Inbox
folder is NOT where you store old e-mails. If you want to keep old
e-mails around, create a user-defined folder and move your old e-mails
over there, or use auto-archiving in Outlook to move them out to an
entirely different .pst file.

It's not a Microsoft problem. It's not an Outlook problem. It's not a
Cox problem. It's a problem of you keeping a super high count of
e-mails in your Inbox and then asking Cox to reset your mailbox which
changed the UIDs on all those items. EVERY e-mail client would behave
the same way because every one of them would see a whole new slew of
UIDs that haven't been downloaded before.

If you have local copies of those old e-mails in Outlook (and hopefully
are not leaving them in the Inbox folder within that program's .pst
file) then why aren't you deleting them from the mail server? If you
aren't accessing that same mailbox using different instances of Outlook
or different e-mail clients, why did you configure your e-mail client to
"leave messages on server"? If you enable that option which means the
e-mail client doesn't delete e-mails after retrieving them, it is up to
YOU to perform the maintenance to purge your mailbox of old and defunct
items.

 

[DL]

Log on to your web mail access & delete them?

Presumably you had your outlook acount options set to leave a copy on the
server, & in resetting the ISP account, outlook no longer recognises that
you have allready downloaded them.

 

[Stephanie]

Where to begin, first of all I did go into Webmail.cox.net and I deleted all
my old emails. Secondly, I have my Outlook set at keeping only 60 days worth
of emails on the server (I'm a real estate agent & need to refer to them for
a little while every once in a while). Thirdly, I go through all my inbox
emails & delete on a regular basis so that I've only got around 100 sitting
there at any given time. Have I missed any steps that you can think of?

After doing all of those things, I think it's very strange that it is
downloading emails from almost a year ago & I cannot get it to stop
downloading them.

 

[Stephanie]

That was the first thing I did...went into Webmail.cox.net and deleted all
the emails sitting on the server. Read the rest of what I did in my reply to
"VanguardLH". As I am writing back to both of you, my Outlook is
painstakingly & slowely still downloading some 3,000 old emails. Is there
any way to stop this activity?

 

[VanguardLH]

Where to begin, first of all I did go into Webmail.cox.net and I deleted all
my old emails. Secondly, I have my Outlook set at keeping only 60 days worth
of emails on the server (I'm a real estate agent & need to refer to them for
a little while every once in a while). Thirdly, I go through all my inbox
emails & delete on a regular basis so that I've only got around 100 sitting
there at any given time. Have I missed any steps that you can think of?

After doing all of those things, I think it's very strange that it is
downloading emails from almost a year ago & I cannot get it to stop
downloading them.

If you don't see the e-mail showing in the Inbox folder (when using POP
access) or any other subscribed folder (when using IMAP) when using the
webmail interface to your e-mail account then they aren't there to get
retrieved. Check what accounts you have defined in Outlook. Maybe you
have an old account defined and are retrieving from there. Maybe the
account you do have defined is pointing at the wrong mail hosts.

If the mail host is offering 4000+ e-mails but you can't see them using
the webmail interface to your account then the server is screwed up (the
webmail interface is out of sync with the mailbox). You can't fix that
on your end. Your e-mail provider will have to fix that problem.

 

[DL]

Not that I know of, what type of mail account is this pop, imap or?
Why are you keeping msgs on the server? are you not Archiving within
Outlook?

 

[Stephanie]

Thanks, "DL" & "VanguardLH"...I figured it out. I had to go into each email
address through webmail and delete old emails, inbox & sent. Didn't realize
that I had so many sitting there on the Cox webmail server.

Lesson learned. I have changed my settings through my webmail server to
delete emails from the server every 10 days instead once read so that they
don't build up on the server.

Thanks for your help...this is a great resource. I'll use it more often!