strange email question..

[thelewisgang]

has this ever happened to anyone else? I use outlook express & have had no problems with it at all. Recently I sent an email to a contact & although I only clicked to send it once, it appeared in their inbox no fewer than thirteen times!!! I am mystified as to why this happened as it has never happened when sending other emails. Any ideas anybody? just curious really. thanks.

[Buenchico]

It's probably nothing to do with your PC or Outlook Express.

As e-mail messages pass along a stream of servers, each receiving server returns an 'acknowledgement' back to the previous server to show that the mail has been received. If no acknowledgement is received, the sending server repeatedly re-sends the mail until it gets an acknowledgement. If there's a problem with the return path from the receiving server, the acknowledgement won't get through even though the mail already has - so the mail is sent again and again until the acknowledgement finally makes it back to the sender. (If no acknowledgement is received after a very large number of attempts to send the message, you'll receive a 'bounced mail' message - even though the recipient might have 50 copies of it!).

So, as I've indicated, the problem was probably related to something along the path that the e-mail took, rather than at your end of things.

Chris

[rojash]

An alternative mechanism by which this could occur (and also one that has nothing to do with you, or your e-mail client) is as follows:

When e-mail is collected from the server, the e-mail client issues an instruction to delete it (you can configure your client to leave it on the server if you want, so that you can [e.g.] collect it from both work and home). It could be that either his client failed to send the delete instruction, or that his server didn't receive it (or that having received it, it failed to act on it).

[thelewisgang]

thank you for your replies. I do appreciate you taking the time to reply.