Multiple Copies Of Same Email Coming

[Mission]

I have set up a few of my email accounts to download to Outlook Express on my PC. Today, I started getting multiple copies of the same email. These are not SPAM -- they have the same time and are from people that I know who are responding to emails I've sent to them. One set of duplicate email came from my php signup form on my web site.

 

The last time I saw multiple identical emails arriving to me, it involved my email at work and precluded a massive email server breakdown on my job. I hope that's not about to happen with my TCH email accounts!

 

Is this my ISP's issue or TCH's?

[TCH-Dick]

Are the multiple copies on the server as well as your email client? Are you leaving a copy of the email on the server? If you are leaving a copy on the server, is your email client failing to recognize the fact that it has already downloaded that email?

 

Open a ticket and we will take a look.

[abinidi]

I think Dick has maybe hit the target here. Check the actual account using Horde or whatever web client TCH provides. Are there multiple messages THERE? Or are you just downloading the same message multiple times from your TCH account.

 

As for the ones on your e-mail sign up, you should check the message headers to see if the message ID is the same. If you are really getting the exact same message, the unique ID will be the same. If the server is sending multiple messages, then the unique ID will be different.

 

Hope that helps.

[nortk]

Also...when do you get the multiple copies?

 

For example, do you start Outlook Express, and it downloads several copies of the e-mail? OR...do you start Outlook Express, get ONE copy of the e-mail, quit, restart Outlook Express, and then get ANOTHER copy of the e-mail?

 

If you are using POP e-mail, your e-mail client (Outlook Express) will issue a command to retrieve a message, followed by a command to mark that message for deletion. Then, when you disconnect from the server, the messages marked for deletion would get deleted. However, if something were to interrupt the normal process (like, your client never got a chance to send the "delete" instruction, or you disconnected from the server abnormally), that deletion might never take place. So, the next time you connect, there it is...waiting for you to retrieve it again.

 

I've seen this before...my in-laws had a dial-up connection that was so slow. If they received a large number of e-mails, they would never download correctly, and they'd get disconnected from the server prematurely. This mean that none of their messages were getting deleted.

Edited February 7, 2007 by nortk

[Mission]

Man, I apologize. I totally forgot about this post. The problem went away on its own.

 

To answer some fo the questions:

 

I'm on cable broadband.

 

I would open OE and several copies of the same email would download, with the same time stamp. I never had the chance to check the headers since the problem stopped on its own and I hadn't gotten back out here to read the posts.

 

If I recall correctly, I did indeed find a few copies of the same email on my TCH webmail account.

 

My accounts are set to delete the messages on my TCH server when they download to OE.

 

The email sign-up from the php form on my web site had the same data & time stamp. Since the problem stopped on it's own, I didn't get a chance to read the replies to this post and check the headers.