Phantom red X records?

[Bill_Texas]

Rarely, but several times this year, I had a rash of red X messages appear that are entirely, or nearly all, duplicates of good messages. Example, just showing the X field and the sender field and date field (sorted by date field descending)

(no X) Joe 10/5/16
(no X) Bob 10/5/16
(no X) John 10/5/16
(no X) Bob 10/5/16
(no X) Bob 10/4/16
(no X) Joe 10/3/16
X Joe 10/3/16
(no X) Jack 10/3/16
X Jack 10/3/16
(no X) Bob 10/2/16
X Bob 10/2/16
(no X) Jill 10/2/16
X Jill 10/2/16
and more, all the way to the oldest. See how there are pairs of good and phantom messages? This will happen to every message up through a date, such as 10/3/16; new messages afterwards are all normal (no more X's).

I realize that I can just sort by the X field and mark and delete them, but I worry about that because if any of them are actually not a fake copy of a "living" message - that is, if they are actually gone - then I would rather have the X record to serve as a "placeholder" to aid me in knowing which messages indeed are permanently gone. In fact, PP has saved me that way in the past, when hotmail had permanently lost old messages, but the placeholders with X were still in PP, so I could intelligently perform damage control.

Maybe this is related to Microsoft's idiotic "Focused Inbox" which I turn off every time I find it forced onto my accounts. (I can explain how to remedy that if anyone wants.)

Note, I have seen this "fix itself" for unknown reasons after I played around with clearing cookies, changing the sort and changing it back, changing from headers to something else and back, restarting PP, and a couple of other wild shots. Two times out of six the red Xs disappeared.

[spc3rd]

Hi Bill_Texas,

This issue and the one in your other topic post are likely going to need the expertise of Jeff & other members of the Esumsoft Team to resolve. (I have contacted Jeff and asked him to review your topic posts here). In the interim, please post back with the following info:

1. Which version of POP Peeper are you using?

2. Is this issue occurring on both your Win XP & Win 7 computers?

3. I noticed you had an issue with the "red X's" back in 2011. Is your current issue similar to the one you had reported back then?

[SIDENOTE]: Your topic from 2011 is in the Esumsoft Forums Archives, which is only accessible by The Esumsoft Team.

Thank you and best regards,

[Bill_Texas]

PP 4.3.0.0
Webmail 4.2.5.0
SS 1.0.1.8
IMAP 4.3.0.0
SendMail 4.3.0.0
Pic 4.1.1.0 (4.3.0.0 latest)
tweak 4.3.0.0

I have only used PP on XP.

I can't seem to see any of my old messages so I don't see what I wrote in 2011. Clicking on "Show your posts" only gives 7 results, though it says 19 right next to it. Is there a hidden date filter when I search, or archiving? Even
https://www.google.com/#q=site:esumsoft.com+bill_texas
doesn't show anything prior to 2014.

[Bill_Texas]

Oops, you just answered why I can't see it, archiving.

Perhaps anyone else who reads this would please comment if the "X rash" has happened to them, to eliminate if it's just my machine or configuration?

[Jeff]

What "server type" are you using? (edit the account to reference)

Presuming that it's a webmail-based account (as opposed to POP3 or IMAP), I can present a likely theory:
Every message has a Unique ID (UID) which POP Peeper uses to determine if you already have the message or not. In most cases (and this is absolutely required for POP3/IMAP), a message will have the same UID for its entire existence. However, some webmail apps may change the UID for a particular message (Yahoo likes to do this, I'm not sure I've actually seen it in any others, but it wouldn't surprise me if you say that it was a Hotmail account).

So, what's happening when the UID of a message changes:
- PP scans the list of messages on the server and gets a UID for each message
- PP finds a "new" UID
- PP does *not* find the original UID

Result:
In normal cases, PP will remove the original message and it will list the new message. In most cases, the user is none the wiser. One exception to this is if the message is marked as unread (or if the user has changed settings to ignore the read-status on the server).

In your case, you're getting duplicates because you've disabled the setting, "remove messages not on server." The duplicate messages that you have with a red-X indicate the original message. Unfortunately, PP does tie certain information to that (e.g. if you've replied to the message), which you'll effectively lose because the server has changed the UID (I guess that's another case where the user isn't "none the wiser").

Solution: switch to IMAP.

[Bill_Texas]

Awesome detailed explanation.

Server type is Hotmail/Outlook on Hotmail and live.com account names, and a couple of outlook.com ones that are IMAP.

Yes, I have disabled the setting, "remove messages not on server" on most accounts as my "damage control measure" described above, which over time has turned out to be a surprisingly useful subtle benefit of PP.

Indeed the great majority of my messages are flagged unread (i.e. they are bold, as unread), either because I opened them on another device, or because I (admittedly oddly) reflagged them. However, the phantoms are equal opportunity; both read and unread get them (perhaps due to the "remove" disabling in prior paragraph).

Your UID theory sounds completely logical. Microsoft is likely the villain, beyond your control.

You said, switch to IMAP. If I understand you, you mean for non-hotmail accounts, since I assume hotmail can't be switched like that, since it's a webmail-based account? (BTW, FWIW, I do not use Outlook for any of my home email accounts, I just use the browser. Not sure what Android uses.)

Where you said "Unfortunately, PP does tie certain information to that" I didn't follow what would be "lost" since there's no "sent" display in PP; did you mean that all derivatives of the original X message would be lost from PP display, or just that they would not show the "X" record?

Thanks for the awesome analysis and communication.

[Jeff]

Server type is Hotmail/Outlook on Hotmail and live.com account names, and a couple of outlook.com ones that are IMAP.

I'd be *very* surprised if this issue occurs with any accounts that are set to IMAP. But since you mention this kind of mix, there is one other explanation -- if you have an account that's set to "hotmail/outlook" and then change it to "IMAP" then you could also get this behavior that you're seeing because the UIDs will be different between the 2 protocols and you'd end up getting a duplicate of every message (the ones with red-X would represent messages retrieved with the previous protocol).

So, that being said, *yes* you can change any of your hotmail accounts to IMAP (hotmail, MSN, live, outlook.com -- they're all the same thing). But, as I realized in the previous paragraph, there will be side-effects to switching it now since you're using the "don't remove deleted messages" option.

What I would probably do, in your case, would be to first remove all the messages in the account first, and then switch it to IMAP. To do the first part, just right-click on the account and select "remove messages from list" (if it's not there, go to main menu: Tools / Options / General and enable Advanced options). Then, edit the account and change the server type to "IMAP."

Another word about IMAP -- Hotmail's imap server isn't terribly reliable so you may get more errors than you're used to (however, PP v4.3 with "IDLE/push" enabled on the bottom-right of edit account minimizes the errors). Personally, I never see any errors in my Hotmail account (I only have 1 that I keep in my primary settings) as of v4.3 (v4.3 adds special handlers for Hotmail's deficiencies). Anyway, ymmv.

here you said "Unfortunately, PP does tie certain information to that" I didn't follow what would be "lost" since there's no "sent" display in PP; did you mean that all derivatives of the original X message would be lost from PP display, or just that they would not show the "X" record?

When you reply to a message with PP, you get a "replied-to" icon in the "read status" column. There are other such things tied to the UID, too (user flags, antijunk status, probably others that I can't think of off the top of my head). If the UID changes, the message with the new UID won't have this information.