TheMatt

Hi all,

I had MS Outlook installed on my computer and configured so that it would leave a copy of the mail on the server. I did this specifically so that I could download the mail on my Linux installation although I had not tested this configuration.

As some of you know, I had a catastrophic disk failure a couple of nights ago, and lost my outlook PST file (I have a copy that is a week old though). However, I am wondering if outlook will automatically re-download all the mail on the server if I reinstall it when I reinstall XP. I wasn't sure if the info of what mail was downloaded was stored in the e-mail client or on the server.

Thanks guys.

MadFrom1991

Usally, the outlook system downloads it from the server, then removes it from the server as you now have a local copy. If there is mail still on the server however, outlook should indeed download it.

chauffeur2

Hi Matt,

Is there any possible way that you can 'connect' directly to the mail server in question?

The reason I ask this is if you set Outlook to leave messages on the server for 5 days or whatever, they should still be retrievable from there.

Just a thought, as I had a strange situation the other day, in that every email I download with Outlook Express™ was unreadable (the contents were blank ), so I logged in to the web mail of my ISP server and retrieved them (after running sfc) ; they were all still there and intact, so I got OE to download them again, and all was well.

The way that I got OE to 'recognise' the mail again was to mark those that I 'missed' as unread (at the ISP server), and it re-downloaded them as if they were "new" emails.

Kind Regards,

Terrister

Yes Outlook will download all the mail from the server.

Kalim

Outlook will download it, yes.

It would be better to checkup on the MUA server first if they're still available though. Not all MUA's allow keeping emails on their server after download using MTA's. I don't recall which provider it was, but one of them delete them no matter which option you choose unless the option to keep emails on their server is also checked in their online webmail configuration settings (aswell as in MTA).

If it's YahooMail and you ever lose emails, then I would contact their support. I'm pretty sure they keep (maybe used to now) the emails saved for a period after deletion, although I never login through the browser to check it anymore since TB came along. I recovered many of my deleted emails this way 8-9 months back after deletion using their website. Over 1000 legitimate inbox emails.

TheMatt

Thanks. I use Comcast for mail and have 250 MB of storage. Was that the MUA you were thinking of?

I have been doing this for awhile and haven't had problems so far.

Kalim

It wasn't, but it was something more generic rather than an ISP, such as GMail/Hotmail/Yahoo/WebMail... I honestly don't recall which accurately enough.