Where are my Emails?

[Guest]

I helped my huband import in his Outlook Express emails yesterday (thank-you
to this site for the help).

Now today when he goes into Windows Mail, it displays no emails. It says
"There are no items in this view", regardless of what folder he selects. I
can still see the directory tree that he created to store his messages. And
when I look at the folder properties, it shows the email counts (both read
and unread), so I think they're still there. But they aren't displayed. I
verified that the view is setup to show all emails (both read and unread).

Any suggestions?

Potential hints: He has McAfee Spam Killer installed and running (Version
8.2), but I don't think that did it. I have disabled it for now just in
case. He has lots of emails, but I don't think it's worse than many other
people. Although his directory structure for his saved emails is complicated
(4-5 levels deep).

I do see the messages and folders on the hard drive.

Has anyone else seen this problem?

 

[Steve Cochran]

I'd bet it is McAfee. Its known to cause problems in OE and I don't think
its much different for WinMail. See www.oehelp.com/OETips.aspx#3

The damage may already be done by McAfee though and I'm not sure you can fix
it easily. I'd uninstall Spam Killer to make sure its not involved at all
and use Start | Search and type

msconfig

and then make sure nothing by McAfee is running at startup. Then reboot and
see if that fixes it.

If not, then I'm not sure what to suggest yet.

steve

 

[Guest]

Thanks Steve. We'll give this a try tomorrow. I asked my Husband to
uninstall McAfee and try re-booting to see how it behaves. It is worth a try.

I'm suspecting some memory issue. Last night as I played with it more, I
got a message that WM was unable to display a message because of it was out
of memory or disk space. I know disk space is plentiful.

We were able to temporarially get his emails to display by clicking Local
folders when WM is first started. That displays the folders in the right
hand pane. Then click on a folder in the right hand pain and magically the
emails will display for a while.

Also, Last night I made the mistake of re-importing his emails to see if
they would magically reappear (although all of his emails have started this
disappearing act -- not just the imported ones). After that is when I saw
the out of memory / disk space error. I deleted the duplicate emails, but I
can't empty the waste basket -- I get an error.

I'll let you know tomorrow how it worked out.

Thx again

 

[Steve Cochran]

I bugged that error message during the beta. Its the default error message
left over from OE4 when they assumed it was an out of disk error. They
clearly didn't fix that.

What it means is there are problems with the message store and McAfee could
be involved. See if getting rid of it helps and if it doesn't then post
back and you can do some other things to start over.

steve

 

[Guest]

We did the following things:
- Uninstalled McAfee; re-booted. It did not seem to make a difference
- He had folders setup in the Inbox and message rules to move messages to
folders based on the account they came in on (I had set this up for him
originally in outlook express to emulate a view I had in Outlook). I moved
the subfolders out of the inbox and turned off the message rules. Things
seemed to behave better after I restarted WM.
- I turned off junk mail filtering for now -- I think it was filtering out
more emails than he wanted it to.

For now, WM seems to be behaving more normal. He'll work with it a couple
days and see how it goes. I think the second step (moving the subfolders out
of the inbox) might have made the difference.

If it seems to be normal after a couple days, we'll starting putting things
back to how they were (one by one and slowly) and see if it starts to hickup
again.

I'll let you know how things turn out.

 

[Steve Cochran]

Good luck! Glad you got it working better anyway.

steve