Change in Windows Mail behaviour with multiple e-mail addresses?

giomach

New Member
My computer has two Windows Vista login profiles, for myself and my wife.

We each have an email address, let's call them [email protected] and [email protected]

We set up these multiple email addresses according to the advice given by our ISP on how to set up multiple email addresses with Orange (part 1) | help & support | Orange UK (Part 1), and how to set up multiple email addresses (part 2) | help & support | Orange UK (Part 2), at least as far as we could understand it.

The resulting email setup is this:
I have email accounts:
My Account: address [email protected]
There are no message rules affecting this account.
Orange Admin Account: address [email protected]
There is a message rule: don't download from Orange Admin Account if To or CC field contains me@ or wife@
I also have a mail account [email protected]
My wife has email account:
Wife's account: address [email protected]
There are no message rules affecting this account.

This setup worked perfectly for years, we use Windows Mail, logged into my Vista profile I got only email sent to my address, and my wife, logged into her profile, only got email sent to her address. Then a few weeks ago, email sent to my wife's address suddenly started coming to whichever of us read our email first — that is, my email account started to malfunction, by downloading email sent to my wife's address. My wife's email account continues to work OK, ie it doesn't read email sent to my address.

I have a bootable copy of my hard disk from the time when things worked OK (31/01/2013), and when I boot from that, it is fine, we each get only email sent to our own address. But not when I boot from my main disk. The copy is too old however to restore from it. I tried a system restore but the oldest one available (09/02/2013) already exhibited the problem.

I have compared, between the machine as booted from the main and backup disks, the Windows Mail settings for the email accounts and for message rules, and I can see no differences, yet the behaviour is different. I have reset the registry subtree HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows Mail on my main disk to what it is on my backup, but no improvement.

To repeat: my wife's email account continues to work correctly, it downloads only email sent to her address, and not email sent to my address. My own email account however has begun to malfunction — if I read the email before my wife does, it downloads email sent to her address as well as email sent to mine. However if I boot from an old copy of my boot disk, both of us get only mail sent to our own address. This is what I want to get back to.

It may be noted that all of these behaviours are obtained without the use of message rules, other than the message rule under my profile affecting Orange Admin Account, as advised by Orange. So I do not think that the introduction of further message rules is needed to fix the problem (or can do so).

As an additional query, can anyone explain the function of Orange Admin Account is, and what would happen if it were removed?

Thanks for any ideas.

PS. Edited to make one correction and for greater clarity (hopefully).
 
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My Computer

I think I finally found the difference between my mail settings and those on my backup boot system, when I compared the contents of C:\Users\...\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Mail\Local Folders where details of each email account is stored in a separate text file with extension .oeaccount The difference is simple, but baffling as to why it should have such an effect.

I found that the field "POP3_User_name" was different for "My Account". I almost certainly retyped this on my main system during the recent (and continuing) intermittent unavailability of these Orange servers, and I typed it in the form: surname.freeserve.co.uk However on my backup, it was of the form: [email protected] (which would be considered an error in most circumstances), and on changing it to match on my main system, things are back in working order, ie. in my Vista login profile, I receive only email to [email protected] and not email to [email protected]

On checking the Orange webpages on setting up multiple email accounts, I find that this is indeed what they recommend, but matters are not helped by the Orange pages referring to this field as the "Account name", while Windows Mail (on Accounts/Properties/Servers) calls it the (incoming) "E-mail username". The Orange pages could also be criticised for not drawing explicit attention to the difference between how this field is filled out for the Orange Admin Account, on the one hand — surname.freeserve.co.uk — and for individual accounts on the other hand — [email protected] , [email protected], etc.

Baffling, as I say, but it's a possible cause should anyone else find email to separate accounts getting mixed together.
 

My Computer

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