Anyone Else Ever had Incoming E-mail Disappear?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Hello Friends. I seem to be battling an e-mail nuisance, and am wondering whether or not anyone else has done the same. So far, a Google search has been fruitless.

Here’s the prob: Last week I noticed I wasn’t receiving certain e-mail messages – such as confirmation e-mails from “greeting cards” I’d sent. So I sent myself “test” e-mails from a Hotmail and a Yahoo account, and neither of those arrived, either.

Called my ISP, and the tech scrolled through the mail log for the day. He found one of my test messages and several other messages that I’d never received. Said they’d been “delivered”. He could not see any confirmations from my greeting cards. His tone implied that I’d either forgotten receiving the e-mails or had inadvertently re-directed them elsewhere.

I figured it was a fluke. But yesterday, a friend asked me to look at an article she’d written. She e-mailed me with an MS Word attachment. I never received the e-mail.

Another call to tech support. This time the tech could not find that e-mail in his log. During some discussion, the tech suggested that my Norton Anti-Virus was “eating” certain messages – those with attachments.

I have my doubts. As far as I know, NAV 2002 has always delivered all my e-mail in the past. Any virus-tainted messages have sparked an alert, and NAV tried to repair or quarantined ‘em. My virus definitions are automatically updated.

Further, my own Hotmail and Yahoo test messages did not contain attachments or any questionable content for NAV to address. I simply e-mailed myself the word “test”. Meanwhile, I’ve checked my NAV log and my firewall log, checked my Eudora settings, stood on my head and did the hokey-pokey, but can’t figure this out.

Has anybody else ever had this problem? I’d sure appreciate any shared wisdom.

Details that may help:
ISP = Local cable company
OS = Win98
E-mail = Eudora 5.1 non-registered
Software = Norton Anti-Virus 2002 and Zone Alarm 2.6.362

2

You don’t have any rules (or whatever they are called in Eudora) set up regarding the processing of incoming mail?

3

A tool that may help in diagnosing your problem is www.mail2web.com - you can go and look at the contents of your POP3 mailboxe before attempting to download; this should at least confirm whether the problem is at server or local machine level.

4

Occasionally you’ll have a junk mail filter that is set to auto-delete. The tech guy from the ISP should have explored that but you never know. I think Eudora can be set up to do that but it shouldn’t be the default. I had a similar issue with Hotmail for a while where it was set to delete certain messages automatically without giving me a say.

But I still got the extraordinarily important penis-expansion emails, thank God.

5

In outlook that can happen if your pst or mbx file is too large. The mail will transfer in but not be written to the file.

6

Mangetout wrote:
>You don’t have any rules…
>A tool that may help in diagnosing…

Thanks for the suggestion. I don’t have any “rules” (or “filters”, as they’re called in Eudora). The mail2web tool isn’t showing much as of yet – today’s “test” message from a Yahoo address has not shown up in my Eudora mailbox nor on the mail2web thingy – but I’ll keep checking. Thanks.

Stolichnaya wrote:
>Occasionally you’ll have a junk mail filter …
That was the first thing I checked. I have absolutely no filters set up in Eudora. Good idea, though – thanks.

Jonathan Chance wrote:
>In outlook that can happen if your pst or mbx file is too large.

What the heck – I’ll clear out the mbx file and see what happens. (Cross your fingers, please.)

Apparently nobody else here has faced this problem, as I don’t see a long list of “Me too!” postings here. <sigh>

Thanks for all the ideas. :slight_smile:

7

A Eudora mailbox file should not experience “size problems” easily. The largest mailbox I’m currently running is only 62 MB (not counting attachments) but I think Eudora can go more than ten times that size without being fazed.

8

If mail2web isn’t showing your message on the server, then the problem lies with your ISP… unless while you’re viewing mail2web, you still had Eudora open and it snuck in and downloaded the messages.

Clkose Eudora, send yourself a test message from your hotmail account and look for it on mail2web; if it isn’t there, ask your ISP why. - messages are usually sent immediately from web mail services and they should normally arrive at the destination mailbox in seconds.

Sounds like there might be some sort of overzealous filtering going on at your ISPs mail server, either that or it just plain isn’t working properly.

9

AHunter3 wrote:
>A Eudora mailbox file should not experience "size problems easily…

My Inbox was over 2500kb, so I just reduced it to 729KB – couldn’t hurt. Lessee what that does.

Again, thanks for all the suggestions, everyone.

10

Mangetout wrote:
>If mail2web isn’t showing your message on the server…
>…they should normally arrive at the destination mailbox in seconds.

Well, now. I sent two test messages – one from Hotmail, another from Yahoo. Five minutes later, Mail2web does not show either one.

I kinda suspected this may be a case of overzealous filtering on the part of the ISP, but I’ve phoned tech support four times, and each time the tech was “stumped” by the problem. I may have to change ISPs or simply use my Yahoo address from now on.

I appreciate your help.