If you have a virus program, say from your isp, that advertises spam blocker - that's most likely why you see that. OE, used to be smart enough not to bother telling you that mail has arrived if it does a block sender. Things change though sometimes. I use another kind of spaminator. Oh,,fwiw\[/ for a long time in OE, I did use the simple Block Sender ... one day decided to clear them all out and start fresh. It was amazing how fast OE worked suddenly when it wasnt checking each mail for that huge list of blocks.

I do not have an answer but rather an observation. There *s h o u l d* be a way. But it depends how complex or expensive the solution might be. For example, I notice that my desktop at work gets synchronized with my home PC so all folders always have the same content. Now granted, people at work might have done a lot of things without telling me that makes this seamless, piece-of-cake looking to me. Your two mail programs are accessing mail files located in each pc and that is what makes them be not in sync. If pc1 could access the mail file in pc2 instead of the mail file in pc2, that would help. Or if both could access the mail file by storing it on an external hard drive, maybe that would help. Let's see if one of the gurus here can give some advice. I have a new pc that could need this feature.

The compress feature is really no big deal and by default is set to act every 100 times your e-mail client closes. The action can be stopped or the numeric changed. I'm on a Vista system with Windows Mail right now. I don't recall if the location is the same for OE. Activate the mail client>Tools>Options>Advanced Tab> on the bottom of the tab click Maintenance button> make adjustments close>Apply. If this is not exactly correct for OE it will give you a general approach for finding the feature. As Owbist reports it removes nothing. The action is exactly the same as the option provided in the Disk Cleanup utility. When used more data is put in less space. I would leave it alone. DA

Ok, OE is an email client. You can utilize it to set up your email from various providers (comcast, verizon, ect) If, for instance your email address was joe_nm@comcast.net, someone conceivably could go right to comcast.net and log in with your email address and actual email password (if they knew it)and access your email. That's the point that I was trying to make about your comment "info says this does not prevent access to messages outside OE.". Identities in OE are fairly safe if your family members don't have the password and you remember to log off after using it. It's certainly not iron clad, but is fairly good protection.