Outlook has downloaded entire BT Mail Inbox

[Judesman]

I use Outlook 2007 and rarely visit my BT Mail Inbox (BT is my ISP). Yesterday I opened Outlook and it started to download every email saved in my BT Mail Inbox, over 3000 emails received in the last 15 months. Obviously I have already seen these emails and I have no idea why Outlook should download them again. I looked for a way to stop the download but the only answer seemed to be to close Outlook and go to BT mail and delete all the emails in my BT Mail Inbox. I did this but it took ages as BT would only let me delete emails in blocks of 50. It took even longer to clean up my Outlook Inbox.

Has anyone any idea why this happened please, any help appreciated?

 

[paul1149]

My guess is that the account was POP3 and was somehow converted to IMAP, perhaps by BT, which is a live sync situation. If so you should be able to spec in Outlook which folders to download.

 

[Judesman]

Thank you Paul. I have checked my Outlook Settings/Server Information/Account Type and this is set to POP3, in fact the box is greyed out without any option to change it. I am not quite sure what you mean by "a live sync situation".

 

[paul1149]

If it were converted to IMAP, it would live sync just as you seem to have experienced. POP keeps a record of what mail is already downloaded. Perhaps that record was lost somehow. IIRC the record is kept on the server, so it looks like a BT error as a guess.

 

[Judesman]

Thanks Paul. It hasn't happened again so I hope it was just a one off.