Orange Webmail loses previous emails

[HoneySuckleDreams]

I may be being a bit thick...

We're away from home and are using the webmail part of Orange to pick up our emails. When I logged in today the previous days emails were no longer in the Boite de reception, only those that were received today were visible. The same thing happened yesterday, it downloaded Wednesday emails, but Tuesdays disappeared.

Has anyone else had this problem? It's very annoying as there were emails that we definately had to reply to and now they are no longer there.

 

[Pickles]

You will find them in a different folder - can't remember the name at present. I think that when you are using the webamil version, the "boite de reception" is exactly that - once you have read them then they are no longer "new" and so become part of another folder.

[BJSLIV]

When it first opens it only shows unread emails. If you click on "mail" towards the top left of the screen all messages will appear.

[HoneySuckleDreams]

Pickles/BJSLIV

Thanks for the replies. I do know a little about email systems but this is doing my head in.

There is something amiss with the way that the Webmail works along side Outlook (with POP3). We've been receiving Emails fine for the last couple of days in Webmail, everything was remaining in the Inbox - read and unread. It was all fine when we went out this morning. I asked the kids (at home) to look up someones email address for us (on outlook). When we got back this evening ALL of the previous days emails had gone, only those that were received after 14:00 today (which is after when No2 son must have gone onto Outlook to look for the email address).

So...putting on my technical hat...this is crap.

I've no idea why the emails are wiped. When I'm home next I will confirm this by having the two systems open at the same time and see if I can replicate the emails disappearing.

[Pickles]

I may be teaching you to suck eggs, in which case I apologise, but the default setting for Outlook with POP3, IIRC, is to download the emails onto the PC and delete them from the server. You have to select "leave a copy on the server" to stop them being deleted ...

[sid]

The simple way to look at it is that Outlook (using POP3) is a mail client  based on your PC (client-side), and you are responsible for organising your email messages locally.

A Webmail service uses a server-side application based on the server (not on your pc, but remote instead).

This affects the way that emails are dealt with when you read them. Outlook usually downloads your messages when you connect, so that everythnig you've received ends up on your PC. As pointed out, it normally deletes the message on the remote server, although you can set it to retain the original copy.

A webmail service, like Yahoo, etc operates remotely and your messages are all kept on the server.

What may have happened is that while you were away you looked at your messages with Webmail, but as soon as Outlook was connected these would be downloaded. The next time you look using Webmail they've all gone.

I've always preferred the Outlook type of system, one reason is that I can be sure of security myself (keeping copies of everything), but another is that I don't have to reconnect every time that I want to re-read a message, it's already on my PC. Also the program doesn't have to download all the message headers each time.

There is an alternative Outlook connection (IMAP) which works a bit like a webmail service, but it's not as common as POP3.

This is a bit of an over simplification, but it might help to explain where your messages have gone.

 

[HoneySuckleDreams]

Sid

That about sums it up...with one exception.

Reading the messages on webmail marks the message as being read, so when Outlook opens again, to view the messages, it downloads those that have not been read (so excludes those that have been read on webmail) and then deletes ALL those emails from the server that have been read. So the next time webmail opens, the messages are not there.  This means that the emails disappear, they haven't been downloaded into Outlook and stored locally, and they can't be seen from the webmail server end, as they've gone from the server. A bit crap really.

I did mess about with Telnet many years ago, connecting to a server directly and deleting emails that were too big to download. I think the software back in the dark ages wouldn't ignore big files, so when you were on dialup at 3k a second the mail system looked liked it was hanging. I think at that time you could also do something to mark emails as not being downloaded and upload them again.

Lesson learnt I think. It should be one system or the other, or when using webmail, forward them to an email address that I only look at using Outlook. Having said that, Windows Mail is a client based mail application, so I could configure that to read the emails on our travelling laptop, we're just tied to using our own laptop everywhere, which sort of nullifies the idea of being able to get to your emails on any system.

[sid]

OK, at least you know what's happened now. [:)]