topic Re: 2 weeks of duplicate emails just arrived ! in Email

2 weeks of duplicate emails just arrived !

irritablegit — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 13:30:37 GMT

All the emails that I had already received over the previous 2 weeks from Plusnet into my Outlook client ... have suddenly arrived again. ow I have to go through and (probably) delete them all. Why is this happening ?

This is not the first time. It happened once before - a few months ago - and only since the move to Greenby was announced ...

Re: 2 weeks of duplicate emails just arrived !

Leanne_T — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 17:14:16 GMT

Hi there @irritablegit

Thanks for letting us know.

Could I just check as you have mentioned the outlook client, if you log into the email account using webmail, do you see the same duplicate emails?

Leanne.

Re: 2 weeks of duplicate emails just arrived !

irritablegit — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 17:31:13 GMT

That's a good question. I didn't check at the time and in fact I almost never log into the Plusnet webmail.

Logging in now, the duplicates are not there (or were never there). Of course, I did delete them all from the Outlook client yesterday so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised they aren't there.

I can't recall the settings re clearing from webmail.

Sorry I can't be more help

Re: 2 weeks of duplicate emails just arrived !

Leanne_T — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 17:41:56 GMT

I see @irritablegit

If this happens again, could you check in webmail to see if they are showing in there as well and let us know? and we can check with the support team to see what could have caused this.

Leanne.

Re: 2 weeks of duplicate emails just arrived !

irritablegit — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 19:18:25 GMT

Re: 2 weeks of duplicate emails just arrived !

tangodoll — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 13:20:27 GMT

Hmm, yes, I've had the same issue.

A while back, I received duplicates of all of my mail going back ages. Obviously added to my inbox size and then during the week and today, I've again received duplicates going back to November accompanied by 'new mail alerts' - I have thousands of emails and not all wanted ones are 'marked as read' 😱

It took me ages before and now, I have to waste more time, deleting the duplicates. 😭

For me, this is just another issue in our 'migration' to greenby. Absolute nightmare!

AND that's not forgetting the intermittent messages that my 'email server isn't connecting' so then that stops my receiving email.

Three months and just problems EVERY WEEK! AArrgghh!

Re: 2 weeks of duplicate emails just arrived !

MisterW — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 13:26:53 GMT

@irritablegit @tangodoll on the device that's receiving the email duplicates, do you by any chance have the email client configured for POP3 with the 'leave messages on server...' option ?

Re: 2 weeks of duplicate emails just arrived !

irritablegit — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 14:03:08 GMT

It's POP and

Leave messages on server BUT delte after 14 days

(Remove from server when deleted from Deleted Items ... is NOT ticked)

Therefore, where did the duplicates reappear from ?

It looks like even after I deleted from my Outlook Inbox (and emptied the Deleted folder)

they should still have been in the Plusnet webmail for 14 days ...

Re: 2 weeks of duplicate emails just arrived !

MisterW — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 15:45:50 GMT

POP was designed to download all messages from the server to local storage and delete them from server. When the 'leave messages on server...' option is used , the POP client has to 'remember' which mesages it had already downloaded to avoid duplicating them. The server generates a UID (unique identifier) for each message on the server, and the POP client remembers which was the last it downloaded. Now the problem is, that if the mail server is reset for any reason, then the UIDs can get changed and so the POP client will download again any messages that are on the server.

An IMAP client doesnt have this problem since it doesnt retain any local copies and thus just resynchronises and presents all mail existing on the server.

Webmail is just an IMAP client that runs remotely and renders the details via a browser.

Re: 2 weeks of duplicate emails just arrived !

irritablegit — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 16:11:54 GMT

Fine

I've been using POP for the past 20+ years with Plusnet and Outlook and this has only happened since the move to Greenby was announced

Re: 2 weeks of duplicate emails just arrived !

stuck — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 17:56:24 GMT

@irritablegit wrote:

Fine

I've been using POP for the past 20+ years with Plusnet and Outlook and this has only happened since the move to Greenby was announced

Which tells you a lot about how this fiasco has meant the mail server has had to be reset many times 🙄

Re: 2 weeks of duplicate emails just arrived !

tangodoll — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 18:37:32 GMT

@MisterW Guilty as charged, but agreeing with @irritablegit , this has only happened since the move to greenby.

Adding to my ever growing 'to-do' list courtesy of greenby, I will revise my settings and maybe delete some emails from the server.

It's a bummer because they're there in case I need to refer to one when I'm out and about. At home, all emails are downloaded to my pc.

Oh well, if it placates greenby and stops them creating extra work for me, I'll have to go with housekeeping. Ugh!

Thank you all

Re: 2 weeks of duplicate emails just arrived !

AyToZed — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 22:05:17 GMT

"POP was designed to download all messages from the server to local storage and delete them from server."

Yes. Quite probably.

"The server generates a UID (unique identifier) for each message on the server, and the POP client remembers which was the last it downloaded."

Sounds about right.

"Now the problem is, that if the mail server is reset for any reason, then the UIDs can get changed"

Which makes it a "server-side" problem.

Re: 2 weeks of duplicate emails just arrived !

MisterW — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 07:45:14 GMT

Which makes it a "server-side" problem.

Yes, its a problem caused by the unreliability of the Greenby servers. In the last few weeks they've been up and down like the proverbial...

However, I cant see the basic flaw in the POP protocol being fixed and so in circumstances where a mail server is reset, the problem will likely happen.

Re: 2 weeks of duplicate emails just arrived !

AyToZed — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 21:33:55 GMT

I'll openly admit that I've never used the "leave on server" option (it causes irritations, especially when the mailbox is being accessed from multiple devices).

I'm still trying to get my head properly around why this option was implemented in clients.

Re: 2 weeks of duplicate emails just arrived !

Francisca — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 21:43:56 GMT

Yes same here. I faced over 2,000 old emails reappearing, or as they were in duplicate, it might have been 1,000. In duplicate. Very challenging.

Re: 2 weeks of duplicate emails just arrived !

Francisca — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 21:45:18 GMT

Same here. Never had problems with Plus Net Livemail for many years.

Re: 2 weeks of duplicate emails just arrived !

irritablegit — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 21:08:40 GMT

@Leanne_T

It just happened again ! The last 2 weeks of emails have just arrived again in my Outlook inbox.

I've just checked and they are NOT also in Plusnet webmail !

Re: 2 weeks of duplicate emails just arrived !

martinund — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:19:20 GMT

I have twice seen duplicate emails. One time, about a week ago, I had emails that dated back to the date that I was migrated in mid-December, that I'd already downloaded and which were so old that my email client had requested deletion of them. And they had been deleted from webmail.greenby.com, because I happened to look a few days before it happened. So it is not the POP clients (plural *) requesting the same message IDs again; it's messages reappearing on the server after they have been downloaded and subsequently deleted from the server.

Then this evening I saw all the ones that I'd downloaded over the past few days, and there is only one copy of each message on the server, so presumably the messages have been given new IDs which is making POP clients download them again.

(*) I use Windows LIve Mail on WIn 7 (this is the "master" client which is set to delete messages with dates older than 30 days); Thunderbird on Win 10; Samsung mail client on and Android phone and an Android tablet (TB and Samsung are set *not* to delete read messaages, even older than 30 days).

Re: 2 weeks of duplicate emails just arrived !

martinund — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:34:31 GMT

I leave messages on the server for a finite length of time for a very good reason: I want to be able to read them from any of several devices, without the first client to read a message from preventing it appearing on any other mail client.

So I set one (and only one) mail client to leave them for 30 days, and all the other clients to leave them forever (so those clients can read messages non-destructively, and there are still there for the definitive archived copy on the delele-after-30-days client).

I wouldn't touch IMAP with a bargepole. I like to retain my own copy of emails that I keep long-term, so I can refer back to them, offline if necessary, long after they would have been cluttering up the server's inbox.

If POP has the shortcoming that resettng the server causes duplicates, then the onus is on the people running the server never to need to reset the server. Greenby were presented to us by Plusnet (and by their own website) as a company which specialises in email. So you'd think they'd have cracked the concept of email by now and their servers wouldn't keep refusing POP connections and needing to be reset.

So... are they competent and experienced, or not?

And still no-one has answered the question: what are they doing about charging for email accounts that no longer have a matching Plusnet internet account? Because as I understand it, those accounts don't get the benefit of two years free before the annual charge. So if those accounts have been migrated, surely Greenby are wanting payment. Maybe those accounts haven't been migrated yet.

Also, is the £15 payment per address or per username? Are addresses a@username.plus.com, b@username.plus.com and c@username.plus.com charged as £15 or as 3x £15? Assuming that "username" is one that used to have a PN account but no longer does because of a house move with a break in the middle (so "username" couldn't simply be migrated from one phone line to another).