Postby mito » Mon Apr 23, 2007 12:50 pm
The only time I've ever had an email client download the same messages via pop over and over was when there was a corrupted message that would hang the pop download.
The way pop works, is it checks to see how many messages, you have, and then starts downloading them. After it's done downloading them, it then either marks them as received, or deletes them, depending on how it's set. If at some point you cancel the download, it then cancels the download portion, but continues the rest of the process (marking received or deleting the messages).
If for some reason, your downloading of the messages is interupted, via service outage, etc, then the rest of the process doesn't continue, and the messages will be re-downloaded later.
In the case of a corrupt mail message, the download process hangs until the program process is terminated, resulting again in downloading the same messages over and over again.
The easiest solution to this is to find the order in which the emails come in repeatedly, and via webmail find the first email that DOES NOT get downloaded. That will more than likely be your problematic message. Either delete it or move it to another folder so that it wont be checked via pop, and try the download again. You will, again, get all the messages you've been getting, but it should also get past those and give you the messages that you haven't gotten.
To minimize the number of repeated messages, you can always cancel the download before it gets to the corrupt message. IE: if you have 74 emails to download, and it always hangs on email 46, then cancel the process when downloading message 40 or so, that way you only have 6 emails repeating, instead of 46.