Panic! 10,000 assorted spam emails just tried to download to my account
Quote from: Barry Marking a message as read in one location will (almost) immediately mark it as read in another location.
Barry, Thanks for taking the time to write the detailed summary of IMAP which is very helpful. When, in the above quote, you say "mark it as read" do you mean the user marking it as read - as opposed to the computer simply recording that you have opened the message? I would want to be able to look at messages but have them remain on the server.
I think my approach to this problem now will be as follows. I still do not know the reason why this happened in the first place and assume it is something at the PN end rather than here on two separate computers.
But life goes on and I need to get sorted. And I need to know if this is a one-off or a permanent problem. Before considering IMAP further I will use my present POP3 account and set it (temporarily) to "leave messages on server for at most one day".
Then I will download by POP3 and hopefully this will then delete all my messages older than one day on the PN POP server (rather than downloading them). After that, I will set it to 14 days and see how it goes.
In the meantime I will also think about using IMAP instead.
Thank you everyone for your help this morning. It is so important to be able to "talk it through" and get help from experienced people.
Thanks!
Can you confirm that you had previously downloaded all 10,000 messages on BOTH machines. If not each PC can only know about the messages it has previously downloaded itself. If you set up the second PC this morning it has no knowledge of the messages downloaded by the first machine. The UIDLs are stored on the PC itself - there is nothing about this stored on the Plusnet server and more significantly nothing in the POP3 protocol that can provides a mechanism by which this information could be stored on the PN server.
As Barry has pointed out, that is what IMAP is for and it would work with 1, 2 or 22 PCs. In IMAP which email have been read is stored on the IMAP (i.e. PN) server.
As Barry has pointed out, that is what IMAP is for and it would work with 1, 2 or 22 PCs. In IMAP which email have been read is stored on the IMAP (i.e. PN) server.
If you want to get rid of all messages older than one day from the servers, IMAP (or webmail) would be a far more efficient way to do it as it means the body of the emails does not have to be downloaded (that's a big difference on any html images with embedded images or messages with attachments).
Quote from: itsme Only downside on this is that I believe the current PN webmail does not support imap folders, but could be wrong.
I've created folders on one of my accounts from webmail and from Thunderbird and both can see and use the folders the other created.
My mistake I checked my main PN email account and did not see all the folders, I forgot that I smtp redirect to my server 
Quote from: Bookman In my Thunderbird account settings I cannot see any option to set it to delete messages on the server older than X days.
This is done on a per-folder basis on an IMAP account.
Right click on a folder (eg Inbox) and select Properties.
Go to "Retention Policy"
Set your per-folder retention policy there!
You can also go to the 'Offline' tab, and enable the folder for offline (ie, no Internet connection available) usage.
B.