sometimes even emails from people you know really are not from people you know! I just got an email from my nephew who often times sends me links to see his kids on little videos or picture albums. Yesterday when I got the email from him and noticed all the email addresses at the top that struck me as strange because he is like me and never leaves email addresses exposed, then on to the link, before I clicked it I hovered my mouse over it and looked down at the bottom of my browser to see if it would give the same address as the link well it did NOT, which let me know this was going to re-direct me somewhere else. That is how people end up on porn sites and infected sites with out knowing how they got there! Since I was on linux and was not afraid of infection I clicked the link and sure enough it took me to some viagra site. Which if I had gone there on my windows machines may well have tried to install some type of malware. So I emailed my nephew immediately to let him know he had a problem. He thankfully was already aware of it and was scanning with malwarebytes to see what showed up. Something had taken over his email and sent that out to everyone in his list which is why all those email addresses were showing, so it looked like it was from him but it was not really him that sent it. So anytime you have a link in an email it is a very good idea to hover your mouse over it and see if it shows the same address down below as it does in the link. This is one reason I hate those short links since you have no idea what the link is going to.

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.

Beache perhaps you need to look on the left side of the Outlook screen. Underneath the "Mail" heading there are "Favourite Folders" and "Mail Folders" and each has a clickable pair of chevrons beside them for a drop down menu. Try clicking each and see what you have, might just be your answer.

bugsybanks : Finally get back to this . . . . re : "Regarding the change to IMAP, I have 3 e-mail addresses set up through my server on the desktop and all 3 are now POP3 on that computer. Do I delete each account and then recreate it as IMAP? Will I lose the e-mails that have been saved under Local Folders? " One thing . . . my "Local folders" only contain Trash & Outbox. All my other Inboxes, etc. are within separate acct folders. I.E., each other acct. contains an Inbox, Drafts, Sent, etc. - outside of "Local Folders." Anyway, there's a good chance that after you create an IMAP acct., the email that you have already downloaded using POP mail, and deleted from the server - won't show up in the IMAP Inbox. You'd have to import them back in. Just to be safe, I would export all your email first so that you have it as backup. Then make new accts as IMAP. See if everything looks correct, or if you need to import anything from the backup you just made. Finally, delete the POP accts. There is a really handy addon tool for TB : ImportExportTools https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools/?src=search (That page looks complicated, but the use of the tool is not) The two different ways to export using that tool are - (and you get to the choices by right clicking on "Inbox" or any other folder) : 1) "Export folder" (w/ or w/o structure) This makes an Mbox file of everything that you export. It makes for just a few simple files that aggregate everything within the respective folders. So you will end up w/ one Inbox file, one Drafts file, etc. "Structure" just means you will keep the nested structure of the folders. The disadvantage is that you can't read them later w/o importing them back first (using ImportExportTools). 2) "Export all Messages" (and choose "eml" format here) This exports each email as a .eml file - and you can identify and read each one separately later after exporting. So if you export 500 emails, you'll get 500 .eml files. You can batch import them though using ImportExportTools. And you can read them just by clicking on them individually. There's no harm in exporting both ways if you like. Just create separate folders so you can keep it all straight. Play around with it a bit until you get the hang of it. For all the people recommending this way to do email or that - this debate has been going on for years. There are advantages and disadvantages to each - it really depends on your needs. I wouldn't say that any one of them is "unusual" as someone commented - what's unusual to one is likely normal to someone else. Personally I use them all, and all for different purposes - no one method seems to work for every purpose. I do use web based email for the most part though. Hope that helped. -Kent This post was edited by kbarb on Mon, Oct 20, 14 at 0:42