I have never heard of an ISP that told you what to use as your email address. Are you talking about your ISP when you say your provider or something else? When I set up our comcast I set up an email address similar to what you are saying with some initals and part of the name. I never use it but set it up just in case I should need one and to get any correspondence from comcast should they email me. I later decided to tie that email account to my ebay account and ebay came back and said that email address was already in use by someone. HUMMM well how can that be? So I created a different one at comcast and used it. Fast forward to last week when just for the heck of it I decided to go check on those comcast addys to see if there was any mail. Well that first one had a ton of spam in it and several emails from someone with the same initals/name and it looks like he also has that same email address. It has not been an issue for me since I just do not use that address but I was able to open all those emails of his and they were business related and some were legal. I am sure he would not be happy about that I know I would not be happy. I have no idea how comcast let that happen, each email address should be unique and never be allowed once someone has locked it in. the other 2nd comcast one I set up and ended up tieing to my ebay had zero spam and only email from ebay in it. very weird and sounds like maybe something very similar is happening in your case. If so the ISP should be able to check those 2 accounts and see why exactly that is happening. Definitely check your full headers and get all the routing info and let them have that info so they can sort it out. you may have to ask how to show full headers each email client is different, I have not used outlook express in ages.

have you tried running virus scans on your pc? is your virus scan updated with all the latest definitions? Usually what that means is that the message you are sending out has something in it that is triggering the virus detection software on the other persons email client so it bounces it back to you. I would try running an online virus scan in case yours has been compromised. This one uses IE. Get a FREE Online Virus Scan what antispyware programs are you running and scanning with?

Betty, I have researched this on my Vista Windows Mail system and I currently don't have access to my old Win98 system with OE. (Garage is snowed in) On the Windows Mail system I opened the addressbook and right clicked on an entry. The drop down window appeared and I selected Properties. The appearing window showed the addressee, Richard Nixon :) among other items. I just back spaced the name out and reentered it as Nixon Richard, and selected OK. The entry took up a new spot in the addressbook now under N. Perhaps this will also work with OE. When it thaws a bit I can check for you. DA

Thanks for the reply, Mikie. I am not sure what you intended me to do but, after fiddling with "what I think you said", I did not see any changes... when I tried to send an email again. My old Pc had Outlook 2003 if that makes a difference. It died so I cannot look at it but I restored the files from backups.