Jim said:
I like to email to myself to check 'the
look'.
It never appears in my inbox, but is always in the Send and All_Mail
folders.
FWIW I spent an hour today with the Indian 'rep' of my ISP taking over my
emails and he could not solve the problem either.
FWIW the same problem arises with Thunderbird, but NOT with Windows Live
Mail.
I'm on Windows 7 with Outlook 2010
Is there a reason you decided not to mention you are using Gmail as your
e-mail provider? I'm guessing that's who you use because of the
All_Mail folder you mention.
Gmail stops some spam that pretends to be you. Few users ever filter
out (via rule) e-mails that have themself listed as a the recipient
because few users send e-mails to themself. So Gmail will block e-mails
sent from you to you. When From = To OR Cc then Gmail figures a spammer
is pretending to be you sending yourself your own e-mail figuring you
filter out yourself. Have you tried using Bcc?
A trick some Gmail users have noted to get e-mails to show up in their
Gmail Inbox when sending from the same Gmail account is to use a custom
From value. See:
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en
Alternatively, use another Gmail, Hotmail, or other account to which you
send a copy. When you send e-mails to yourself, they don't leave your
e-mail provider. They get immediately routed internally back into your
account so you can't be sure what they look like outside that provider
or that they even got out to be delivered from that provider. If you
want to see what others see and to check that your e-mail got sent then
you have to send it to some OTHER domain than for your e-mail provider,
like sending from your Gmail account to your Hotmail account. To make
sure your e-mail went outside the boundary mail server to get delivered
outside, you must specify a recipient outside (some other domain).
Internally routed e-mails, like a copy to yourself, do NOT furnish proof
that your e-mail provider ever delivered your e-mail.
Note that sending a copy of an e-mail outside of your e-mail provider to
some other-domain e-mail provider doesn't provide absolute proof that
your e-mail provider sent out your e-mail. For each recipient, a
separate copy is sent to each. So the copy that managed to get to your
outside account might arrive but not the one you sent outside to someone
else. You can try to use read receipts but many, if not most, users
disable sending back any read receipts. They don't like senders spying
on their e-mail habits. You can request a delivery receipt but that
will tell you only that an e-mail got to the receiving e-mail server,
not that it got into the recipient's Inbox or that the recipient read
your e-mail. Also, most e-mail servers ignore delivery receipts since
it duplicates their status. A delivery receipt is asking for positive
indication that an e-mail got delivered to the receiving mail server
(and proves nothing beyond that point). Servers already provide
negative indication by sending back an error status if delivery fails or
is rejected. Not get a negative status means your sending server says
your e-mail got received at the other end. There is no guaranteed
delivery for e-mail. If you want proof your e-mail got received then
you have to ask the user to tell you they got your e-mail; however, they
can ignore that, too, just like they have their client ignore requests
for read receipts.
You are using 3 different e-mail clients? Thunderbird, Windows Live
Mail, and Outlook 2010? You sure the problem is polling your e-mail
account using multiple e-mail clients? Maybe you're pulling the e-mail
into one of them that is configured to DELEte after RETRieve so it isn't
available when you use the next e-mail client. Are they all using IMAP?
Are you using POP? Are you using HTTP/Deltasync in WLM or in Outlook
(using the Outlook Connector add-on)? Do you have any rules defined in
those e-mail clients? How about filters (rules) defined up on the
server in your account?
That you see your e-mail show up in the Inbox of your local e-mail
client doesn't mean it got sent out and then received. Your e-mail
client might be depositing its own copy immediately in its own Inbox
folder and that copy was never sent out to then get delivered back to
your account to show up in the Inbox. If using IMAP or HTTP/Deltasync,
and depending on the client, the "In other than Inbox folder, save
replies in Sent Folder" works oppositely than written. The client ends
up saving the sent copy in the Inbox folder instead of the Sent Items
folder when this option is enabled. Disable it if you want to see what
really got delivered to your Inbox through your e-mail server. This is
normally a problem with replies showing up immediately in your Inbox and
not when you send new e-mails.
If you're only interested in checking what your e-mail looks like then
just look in your Sent [Items] folder in your local e-mail client or up
on the server in your account using the webmail interface (if using IMAP
or HTTP/Deltasync). That's what you sent. As to what the recipient
will see depends on what client they use and how they configured it.
Just because you use a lot of fancy HTML and/or images and make it look
all pretty and busy doesn't mean that is what the recipient sees. You
have no control (thank god) over what client the recipient uses and how
they configured it. That's their choice, not yours. You can never
guarantee the recipient will see what you saw when you compose an
e-mail. If you want to better ensure (but not guarantee) the recipient
sees what you see then put the document in a web page and give them a
hyperlink to it. Of course, they may use a web browser that is
configured differently than yours, like stripping out all scripts, using
different fonts, different zoom level, placeholders for pics instead of
showing pics, etc. Again, you don't get to control what client the
recipient uses or how they configured it.
Probably the best way to help ensure the recipient sees what you see is
put your message in a document and attach that file to your e-mail. You
could save your document as a Word .doc file but the recipient might be
using an old version of Word, or the Word Viewer (which doesn't show
nearly the same level of formatting as does Word), or some other program
that supports .doc format but not at 100% fidelity. PDF would probably
work best to ensure the recipient sees what you see.
