After email fixed .. huge numbers of emails arriving?

[RichB90]

Hi - I’ve been in touch by DM here with helpful real people about my email not working since 16-17th July.
It is now but … I received 46,000 emails after it restarted .. and hundreds were also SENT from mine. 
Most are many years old. 
Anyone else get this? 
Any quick solution? (I have been sorting my email, then deleting in bulk)

[RichB90]

(I have Norton on both PC and iPhone)

[coenoby · Accepted solution]

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@RichB90 wrote:

 I received 46,000 emails after it restarted .. and hundreds were also SENT from mine. 
Most are many years old.

So is that just in your VM webmail account on the VM website or is that in an email app or client (such as Microsoft Mail or Outlook) that you use to manage your VM emails?

1) If it's just in an email app:

Then that must be using the IMAP protocol rather that POP3 because you mention that it also affects your Sent folder as well as the Inbox.

In that case my first thought would be to delete the VM account from your app.     Important - do not delete the email account from your My Virgin Media account.

Then add your VM email account back into the app. The IMAP protocol in your app will then download your entire email account but without any duplications.

2) If you are just using the VM webmail service to manage your emails and you are seeing these old duplicate emails.  That sounds as if there was an issue when VM reactivated your email account after the VM email meltdown a few weeks ago.

That would need to be investigated by VM.

Coenoby.

[RichB90]

1) If it's just in an email app:

No it's iPhone Mail, Virgin Webmail, and iPhone mail.

2) If you are just using the VM webmail service to manage your emails and you are seeing these old duplicate emails.

I guess answer to 1 covers it.

Did have a thought though - doesn't explain everything. I wanted to set up an automatic note in Outlook, saying I was having email problems. This isn't easy in non-MS Exchange Outlook, Help tells me, and I had to set up a rule.

Therefore (horrors) when the 43000 email came in (for whatever reason), Outlook tried to send automatic notes to all ... I think.   

[coenoby]

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@RichB90 wrote:

No it's iPhone Mail, Virgin Webmail, and iPhone mail.

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Thanks for that update.

Sorry to ask more questions but I see that you mention "iPhone Mail" and "iPhone mail". Did you just mean the iPhone (Apple) mail app in both cases or do you have an iCloud (@icloud) email address that is also affected in addition to a VM email account? 

I must also admit I'm a bit confused that later in your post you mention  Outlook. So are you using Outlook's IOS email app rather than Apple's? Or are you also using Outlook on a Windows device and if so is that also affected?

If  these duplicates are also happening with a non VM email account then that points to an issue with the app rather than VM's email service.

Moving swiftly on.

The way that IMAP works it is (just) possible that a glitch in an email app (of whichever origin) it could have resulted in:

1. the app downloading old emails from the server for a second time and then
2. because email apps are designed to keep the contents of your email app in sync with the server, the app could have uploaded those duplicates back to your webmail account. That should not happen but it is not totally out of the question.

if I was faced with the situation that you are seeing right now I would say that the best thing is to delete those duplicate emails from your VM Webmail account rather than from your email apps such as Apple Mail or Outlook.

Remember that the VM webmail account does have a "Delete all messages" function which deletes all messages from the selected folder.

If there are more unwanted emails than ones you need to keep you may find it easier to move the messages that you want to keep into a temporary folder. Then use the delete all messages option to delete all the unwanted emails in the original (say the inbox) folder. You can then move the emails you want to keep back from the temporary folder into their rightful place.

From how I read the situation, the jury is still out as to whether the problem was caused by VM or by one of you email apps misbehaving.

However, once you have deleted the duplicates from VM webmail you can then see if it happens again. If it does that suggests a problem with the email app.

I hope that helps.

Coenoby

[RichB90]

I’ve just worked out that it’s just possible I caused this myself .. by a unique set of circumstances.. 

I’ll explain later.