This has been the week for some weird problems. Whether users have opened dialog boxes and accidentally clicked on the wrong things or “IE7 did it to me,” I’ve read of some subscriber problems have been very frustrating. Take this one from Louise, for example:
Terry,
I have somehow clicked on something this morning, and now my messages that should go in my “inbox” are going into my “deleted message” box.
I have tried different things, and I am at a loss as to how to fix this. Please help. Thanks in advance. Louise Langley..
Oh I have DSL Windows XP. OUTLOOK EXPRESS for my email.
I wrote back to Louise to say that it appeared that she had created a new rule (in Outlook Express) to handle incoming emails.
Unfortunately, it sounds like she accidentally set up the rule take all incoming email and put it into the Deleted Items folder.
You can check your email filters that you have set up in Outlook Express by using the following steps:
- Start Outlook Express
- From the menu bar, click on Tools
- Message Rules, and then
At this point, you will be at Message Rules dialog box. For emails, stay on the Mail Rules tab. Then, click on the first mail rule (in my case, this has the default name “New Mail Rule #1″ and review the Rule Description (the conditions and actions) in the box below.
This will show you the email message handling rules that are currently set up. Click on each and check them to see if they say what you intended them to say. The newest rule, by default, is at the end of the list — so that’s probably were the problem can be found.
(click on the image for a larger version)
As you can see in the example, the Rule Description box shows that I have created a rule that says that, if the From line contains “Spammer McSpam” (you’d put in the real name, if you were trying to create a rule like this), then Outlook Express is to delete the email. In other words, it would transfer the offending email into the “Deleted Items” folder.
Tech Tip
Don’t bother trying to control spam this way — if you get spam, about the only thing you can believe about the Sender/From is that the indicated person DID NOT send it. To control spam, you need to use a program designed to identify emails that it thinks are spam so that you can (1) check them and (2) delete or handle them.
It appears that Louise had selected “Delete it” in the #2 box — but had accidentally clicked on All Messages in the #1 box.
If she did that, the resulting rule, as you can see below, says “Apply this rule after the message arrives: For all messages, Delete it.”
and
I am having this same problem but there are no rules at all set up in my outlook express. I think I got some kind of virus. Every time I try to do something in Outlook express it is asking me if I permanently want to delete something. When I click no the window won’t close. It only closes if I press yes. This is a horrendous problem for me!
I am having the same trouble with no rules created. Also Invites to meetings are also going into the deleted folder. This doesn’t happen everytime and they do show up in the inbox on the BlackBerry! This is very wierd!
When I delete an email they used to go into the deleted folder in order, now they end up in there willy nilly and every time I have to search thru all the deleted messages, and I mean all to find the one I just deleted that day, is there a way to get them to display by the day they are deleted in order, and not completely out of order?
I’m having the same problem. Outlook 2011 for mac. It is totally random, not all emails but only some of them, skips the inbox goes to trash, and also copies the email to the inbox folder on “on my computer”. I’m getting crazy about this, 0 rules, still happens.
Just check for blocked senders option in same tab..