Techie advice please

[seemster]

IN BRIEF

In a nutshell... I switched from POP3 to IMAP email accounts on Thursday, then my PC mysteriously encountered some problems earlier today, and I've since realised that my email has (sort of) reverted - but I'm unsure if this is related to the account switch I did or to the PC problem...

Please help if this is your sort of thing (I think I've seen some PC experts on here but can't remember who you are) or if you can suggest someone who can help. I've written it all out in step by step to try to keep it clear, and as I worked in IT in a past life I know how helpful it can be to have full details of an issue.

IN FULL

- My work email accounts (2 of them) are registered with / hosted by 123-reg and my HP Pavilion laptop is fairly new, no problems, kept in good shape, running Outlook 2010 and Windows 7.

- When I bought Outlook 2010 I didn't realise I should be setting up the accounts as IMAP and used POP3 instead (I like to access email on multiple devices, and have them all synching, hence I was told I should have used IMAP)

- I then decided to do the conversion from POP3 to IMAP, created 2 new accounts, followed all the instructions I found online, then manually, laboriously, copied and pasted emails from the old accounts into the new ones, could only do 20 or so at a time or Outlook would hang. Then removed the old accounts.

- I did all that on Thursday. I tested opening and closing Outlook, sending and receiving from different accounts and different devices all seemed fine.

- Didn't use the laptop yesterday. Today, switched it on, started up fine, opened Google Chrome and got an error msg, "not connected to the internet and some plug-ins have been disabled." Weird, wifi signal looked good, internet access showing as fine in the network settings.

- Closed down Chrome, tried reopening, screen went black (don't think I did anything else, certainly didn't do anything odd)

- Held down the power button, waited a second and started up again. Got the old MS-DOS like screen, WIndows didn't shut properly, chose to restart Windows normally - but Windows tried and couldn't start.

- Powered off manually again, started up and this time opted for Windows to detect problem (or something, can't remember exact options).

- Does its thing, comes back and says need to Restore, so selected Restore. It said that none of my personal info or files would be lost but any recently added programs would be deleted (I'm thinking this could be relevant to my issue?)

- For about 30 mins it was "attempting repairs" - I sat next to it but of course the minute I moved away to get something... A message flashed up and I missed it, couldn't see what it said. By the time I was back at the screen I was looking at the HP Recovery screen, with options to reboot, recover, repair, call support, loads of different options and no way of knowing if I needed to do any of them.

- I decided that Windows must have done its thing, cancelled out of the HP options and from then on all seemed well with the PC.

- Then a bit later I decided to open Outlook. The two newly created accounts have disappeared, the old accounts are there but empty. Major panic. Then realised all my email was being "received", I guess downloading from the server. (For a minute I thought IMAP must not be storing locally and thought "will this always be the case that when I open outlook I have to wait for everything to download")

- But no, I checked and actually the accounts are the old POP3 accounts.

- Now I have an inbox full of "unread" emails, and - more worrying - not all the emails are there (I reckon about 70 are missing as I deleted some, maybe 30 or 50, but am at least 100 down on the item count, bottom left corner)

- The ones that I know are missing do appear when I search on the ipad which seems to suggest they are stored on the server?

- The latest sent emails (sent from the past 2 days on the ipad) are not showing.

So, is this because my PC did a restore and although it said "programs recently added will be deleted" that actually included the 2 new email accounts? Or is it something just related to the email accounts?

The thought of doing the whole POP3-IMAP thing again (it took a full day and night) is awful but worth it in the long run - I just don't want to do it if this issue will reoccur. Did I do something wrong? Or was it just coincidence that the PC issue occurred when it did and some stars weren't aligned properly, but next time it won't happen?

Thanks so much to anyone who can help with this... I'm going for a drink...

Seema

[Burbage]

"I then decided to do the conversion from POP3 to IMAP, created 2 new accounts, followed all the instructions I found online, then manually, laboriously, copied and pasted emails from the old accounts into the new ones, could only do 20 or so at a time or Outlook would hang. Then removed the old accounts."

It's difficult to know how to be diplomatic about this.

For future reference, you should have exported ('archived' in Outlook-speak) your emails from the relevant accounts to PST files, copies of which you put somewhere very safe, deleted the old POP accounts, and then set up the new IMAP accounts and then left them well alone for a while.

Because IMAP is like webmail, the mail server acts as an 'authoritative' view. All the other machines that connect via IMAP will believe what it says about what messages have been read, which are new and which belong in each folder. If there's lots on the server, it may take a while for them to work out what's happening.

However, cutting and pasting messages from one 'live' account to another in Outlook when they both have the same address was unwise, if not bizarre. Sadly, instructions you find online can be both unwise and bizarre, so you don't need to blame yourself. Not as would make much difference, anyhow.

In practice, that's the bit that's most likely to have baffled the machinery seriously. That's good news in one sense. I first suspected chunks of your hard drive had gone floppy, but on second reading, I'm inclined to pin it on this. Email isn't quite as simple as it looks, and just having two marginally different messages in the same account with the same message ID might be enough to kick things off nicely. Mind you, that doesn't mean its not your disk, but it's probably best not to think of that just now.

Now it's best to just limit the damage. If you really feel the need to continue fiddling then:

1. Take backups of the new accounts on the naughty machine (unless they're all the same), if it'll let you, and make sure you name them properly, and in a way that you know they're possibly corrupt.

2. Delete the new accounts (on the naughty machine, again), no matter what sort they are.

2. Check all the other machines that you're using (if any) and make sure they're set to leave messages on the server (you might want to go offline to do that, just in case they aren't), or are proper IMAP accounts.

3. Set up the new IMAP accounts on the bad machine, and leave well alone. They will, when they've synchronized with the server (which will take a while if there's lots up there) download all the stuff they don't recognize (expect some, if not all, to be 'unread' - if you've not been using IMAP before the server won't know what you've already read).

4. Use your Ipad to check your old messages.

5. If, after a week or so, you find you really do have to restore some old emails onto the laptop, then you can either attempt to restore them from the backup PST files into the new account. But be careful, as they might be dodgy, so make backups of each account first. If you want to be really safe, then set up duplicate POP accounts in Thunderbird (set to never check the server, and always to leave the messages on it) and import the PST files into that.

If you find you can't do steps 1 and 2, then dust the parlour, worm the cat or whatever else you normally do on a Saturday night. At some time, you'll probably have to do some uninstalling/reinstalling of Outlook, with an aim to starting with a cleanish slate, but you won't want to worry about that now. It'll be a whole lot easier if you've got reasonably fresh backups from before this episode, but if life was supposed to be easy it wouldn't be us that were stuck with it.

[seemster]

Burbage, you are very kind, thanks so much for this. Will PM you too, Seema