deborah said:
I transferred outlook from one laptop to another. Everything fine. First
time I opened in the new computer, had 1200 unread msgs from years back. Next
time, took forever to open because it was receiving 15,500 msgs. I shut it
down. But what do I do? I can't use Outlook on my new laptop
Anytime you connect a different e-mail client, it will download
everything it sees in the mailbox. The e-mail client keeps track of the
message IDs of the e-mails that it has received before. The server
doesn't keep track of that because it doesn't know which e-mail client
you are using and how many different ones you might connect to their
service. You left 15,500 mails in your Inbox - which is NOT smart as
that folder changes the most often and a large number of items within it
can lead to corruption and you lost your mails. Every different e-mail
client you connect to your same e-mail account will all items in the
Inbox folder as a *new* item and download it. Installing Outlook again
(under the same of reinstall of the OS) qualifies it as a new e-mail
client, so every item in your mailbox looked new to the new install of
Outlook. The new install of Outlook would have no record of the old
message IDs that had been downloaded before.
On the server using the webmail interface to your account, create a new
user/temp folder. Move the 15,500 mails from the Inbox folder to this
user/temp folder. Then move a couple hundred mails from the user/temp
folder back into the Inbox folder and retrieve those using your local
e-mail client. Repeat the process of moving a couple hundred mails from
the user/temp folder into the Inbox folder and re-poll your account
using Outlook. Of course, it would reduce how many mails you had to
download if you actually did some cleanup of the mails sitting on the
server. I doubt you really need to keep all those 15,500 mails. So get
rid of the crap that you haven't bothered to clean out before and just
download the mails that actually are important to you.
