I keep hearing the tone when a new e-mail drops into my mailbox, but there is no new e-mail. I am using Outlook Express. I have several blocked e-mail addresses (Spam) that go directly into the Deleted Items. Both my Inbox and Deleted Items show the number of unread e-mails, some times these numbers change some times they don't. On several mailing lists every so often I will read an answer to a question that I never saw come through on the list. So...where is this e-mail going? Nancy in Louisiana "The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not".........Thomas Jefferson

Hello Nancy, Sunday, February 6, 2011, 2:05:58 AM, you wrote: NW> I keep hearing the tone when a new e-mail drops into my mailbox, NW> but there is no new e-mail. I am using Outlook Express. I have NW> several blocked e-mail addresses (Spam) that go directly into the NW> Deleted Items. Both my Inbox and Deleted Items show the number of NW> unread e-mails, some times these numbers change some times they NW> don't. This usually happens due to corrupted or conflicting message rules and the only way to resolve it appears to be deleting rules until the problem goes away or deleting them all and starting from scratch :-( NW> On several mailing lists every so often I will read an answer to a NW> question that I never saw come through on the list. So...where is NW> this e-mail going? This isn't too unusual with mailing lists and the missing message may have fallen foul of a badly set up anti-spam program on a server that part of the message goes through or isn't able to forward on for one reason or another. What isn't generally understood about e-mail is that your messages are not sent in one chunk - they are split into many smaller packets and each one may go via a different route between the sending and receiving server. It only takes for one of those packets to not arrive for the whole message to fail to send and since mail servers cannot hold onto partly received messages for long they end up being deleted. Upshot is that the message does not get through and since it's incomplete the receiving server cannot re-assemble to find out where it came from and send a bounce message back to the sender or alert the recipient. It it was able to re-assemble then the message would be there and ready to pick up :-) That's why you'll see that in all e-mail providers terms of service that it isn't a guaranteed service, but agreed that this isn't made *too* clear by any of them !! It also doesn't help that in terms of internet traffic e-mail packets are the lowest priority of all and in times of congestion or routing outages then they are the first things to be dropped to try and get the system back in action. When you consider exactly how 'the internet' works it's amazing that it works as well as it does really <lol> -- Best regards, Barry mailto:[email protected] MicroSoft Free Zone running Ubuntu 10.04 'Lucid' 64bit