Email time travel
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- Re: Email time travel
Email time travel
12-01-2009 6:34 PM
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A strange thing happened this evening - after firing up my email client, (Mozilla Thunderbird), I was astonished to see 8 emails in my inbox dating back from 08, eg 27/10/ 08, 3/11/08 and 23/09/08, freshly downloaded in front of my eyes.
These were emails which I had received before, as I recognize a couple, and they were downloaded by thunderbird the same time I downloaded emails sent today. Any ideas anyone?
(Also, and this may not be related in any way shape or form, I had to reactivate windows as it said my hardware configuration had changed, - it hadn't!)
Dave
Re: Email time travel
12-01-2009 6:53 PM
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The best way to determine if they have been genuinely delayed is to check the headers here, this will give you a nicely formatted version of the headers
TBH, Email Retry Timeout interval can't be more than 7 days, cause traditional post will be faster
so this is more like PC restoration to a previous date.
Re: Email time travel
12-01-2009 7:40 PM
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I have tried unsuccessfully to analyze my headers despite following the instructions on the web page (Mozilla does not allow you to right click and copy all of the header information to analyze - however it does state in the headers that it was received by me on Mon, 27 Oct 2008 02:05:49 PDT.
I received all of the original emails at the time stated within the headers - these appear to be duplicates. No restoration has been carried out on this PC for at least 12 months.
Edit to say I have managed to analyze the headers and it does say it was received by me on the date above.
Dave
Re: Email time travel
12-01-2009 7:59 PM
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Bob Pullen
Plusnet Product Team
If I've been helpful then please give thanks ⤵
Re: Email time travel
12-01-2009 8:07 PM
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Thanks for the handy shortcut - all headers report being delivered on the original date - so yes it looks like a local PC problem (I am using POP3), perhaps the windows activation request is another side effect of whatever the issue is.
Dave
Re: Email time travel
12-01-2009 8:08 PM
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Re: Email time travel
12-01-2009 8:17 PM
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Quote from: Bob emails won't be on the server therefore you won't have been able to download them again.
They might be, if 'Leave messages on server' is ticked.
I've had something similar happen with Thunderbird & a very old Freeserve (Orange) email account that I still have. It gets heavily spammed & can have over 5000 messages in it. Some of the mailboxes within it get periodically downloaded to different PCs, so most of the time it is set to leave messages on the server.
I'd put it down to the POP3 mailbox getting overloaded & confused at the server end, because none of my other accounts have ever had the same problem, despite similar settings & being collected by the same copy of Thunderbird.
If it's happening on a Plusnet account too, then maybe I was wrong to blame the server.
Re: Email time travel
12-01-2009 8:26 PM
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I have never used the 'Leave messages on Server' option (although I did double check when you mentioned it) and the mail account is my free domain name given to me by PlusNet when all the spamming occurred.
I will put it down to Gremlins I think!
Dave
Re: Email time travel
12-01-2009 9:20 PM
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Otherwise, would the original emails in question have been deleted from your system or kept in your inbox or another folder? The ones that got "downloaded", were they intact and readable, ie not corrupted in anyway? If the file that controls the downloading gets corrupted (Pop3uidl.dbx in Outlook Express, don't know what it is in Thunderbird) then all sorts of strange things could happen. From your initial post looks as though there might have been some corruption somewhere. I'd be inclined to give your system a check over, ie back up anything important, run then scandisk and defrag. HTH.
Re: Email time travel
12-01-2009 10:14 PM
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I checked on the webmail at PlusNet and the messages definitely aren't there. The original emails were deleted and then permanently deleted from the 'Trash'. All of the downloaded emails were intact and exact duplicates - they were showing as unread too.
I agree about giving my PC the once over and will start PM tomorrow, luckily I have a good backup plan in place so I am not worried about losing data. I am very interested in the cause of this though and have been reviewing any new installs - the only software I have installed over the past 7 days is Daemon Tools Lite and I cant see how that would affect anything.
Dave
Re: Email time travel
12-01-2009 11:31 PM
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Chris.
Re: Email time travel
12-01-2009 11:37 PM
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I seems to have corruption of some sort after a mass of archiving, deleteing, moving and general faffing about. All the messages I had moved from the inbox all reappeared in the inbox again, but as unread. It didn't do anything to those that didn't receive any changes.
Never found an explanation myself, nor has it happened since.
Did you do any mass management recently?
Re: Email time travel
13-01-2009 7:16 AM
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Outlook express has an Index files thats stores all the details of deleted e-mails untill you compact the mailbox.. I personally did manage to recover some deleted e-mails from this Index in the past - I did it on purpose as I wanted them., try opening index.dat with notebook
The originator of this thread did have a hiccup with his sysytem, it must have rolled back to a past restore and that could have got the e-mails from his index file
Re: Email time travel
13-01-2009 8:15 AM
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If it was a PC restore then surely I would have noticed other changes, for example software updates would have disapeared; or more obvious would I not have to positively acknowledge a rollback?
Dave
Re: Email time travel
13-01-2009 8:28 AM
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