A question on behalf of my mother. She runs a business from home and received an email about a week ago from someone with the ministry she is currently working for.
The email arrived with no attachments, although was sent to many people at once. She read it and left it alone after that.
However, since that time, she receives anywhere between 10-20 copies of the **same message ** per day. The messages all come with the same header and all display the same ‘sent’ date as the original.
We can’t work out the problem. We tried putting the address under ‘block sender’ but that does nothing. She wrote back to the original sender to ask if they knew what it might be but has recieved no response. I have told her to also contact the ministry directly and she will be doing that shortly.
Nobody else who received the email has had any problems and a virus scan of the whole computer and the individual emails revealed nothing.
Does anyone know what this might be and how we could fix it? (That is, if the problem is at our end).
She is running Outlook by the way, on Windows XP. I know next to nothing about troubles with Outlook as I have never liked it much and don’t use it.
Open the Tools menu in Outlook, and select Accounts. Select the **Mail ** tab at the top, then select the email account you are having trouble with (she may have only one). Click the Properties button on the right side. Select the Advanced tab at the top of the new window. Near the bottom of the new window, you will see Leave copy of messages on server. Is it checked? If so, uncheck it. Then click OK, then Close.
When I worked for a popular U.S. ISP, sometimes people got messages that were somewhat malformed (usually spam, but sometimes not). When downloading, the message in question would break something on either the server or client side, and the connection would drop before the mail client had a chance to mark messages as deleted.
This lead to people getting one or more messages over and over and over and over again. I recommend logging on to your ISP’s webmail server (it’s almost guaranteed to have one), and using that to delete the troublesome message (and perhaps the ones above and below it if you don’t care about them).
What Fear Itself posted some sense, but only if the mail client is freaking out for some reason, as if it leaves messages on the server, it should be able to tell that they’re duplicates the next time it logs on.
It turned out that the message had been sent by the manager, rather than his secretary, who usually did this. From what we figured out, he had managed to mess it up somehow so that I (the first address on the list) got 1 copy for every person on the list. So instead of sending 1 copy to the 1600+ people on the list, he sent 1600 copies to me.
Overloaded my mailbox, and actually messed up the server for our whole department. The messages were coming in faster than I could delete them, and the overload was making my email delete slower and slower. The IT people eventually fixed it, by deleting my whole mailbox (including all the messages I was saving there).
The manager never admitted this, of course, but the IT people looked at the headers and agreed that this was what had happened. But that manager never sent another such message when his secretary was on vacation – he just rescheduled things so that it didn’t happen when she was gone.
Oddly enough, that message was from a government agency, too.
Could this possibly be what happened to you?
Fear Itself, Nanoda - I will try both suggestions tonight and see what happens.
t-bonham@scc.net - A few days ago I’d said that was probably it, as the woman who sent the original was renowned for not being too savvy with computers etc. But there were only maybe 20 recipients for the email - my mother has definitely recieved more than that by now.