Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

I'm tearing my hair out with this one. Can anyone help?

I'm using Outlook 2010 and have five "@ntlworld.com" accounts setup to send and receive my VM e-mails. They access VM via POP3/SMTP and use the "recent:" trick to ensure I pick up all of my e-mails.

When I send e-mails from any of these accounts a copy of the sent e-mail is placed back into the Inbox. I'm at a loss on why this happens.

I believe I've checked all of the Outlook settings and can't see anything that would cause this. I've also got no Forwarding or Filters set on the VM accounts.

I also have a couple more e-mail accounts set up for G-MAIL and my own domain (POP3/SMTP) and neither of these places a copy in the Inbox.

Has anyone come across this before? Is this a VM feature?

Thanks for any pointers,
Badders

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

I have Outlook 2010 and I think I know what the issue is as I have managed emulate your fault.

Click New email and choose options from the top line and look for the Save sent item to option and left click it and look to see if it says Inbox at the top, if so click other folder and choose Sent Items and try sending an email to someone.

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

I get this with Thunderbird, at first I found it annoying but it can be useful as i sometimes use another PC to send email from.

The way it acts, is not as if it is copying the mail to sent items and, to inbox, but as if it does send it to correct recipient and a BCC to yourself, as I found the version in the inbox arrives a bit later, sometimes if the recipient wrote a speedy reply, same time as proper reply.

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

Hi Masque, thanks for the suggestion.

Save Sent Item To is set to "Use Default Folder". If I choose "Do Not Save" I still get the e-mail in my Inbox, bizarrely, but not in Sent Items.

admars: The e-mail arrives straight away - there is no delay so I'm not sure it's even going through the mail servers. Thanks for the suggestion though.

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

Change the folder to sent items as above by just clicking Other Folder and chose sent items, do not leave as default as it appears to think your inbox is the default folder.

I have just tried it 4 times with different folders and it does work.

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

The specifying of the folder works fine - whatever I specify it goes there. But I always get a copy in the Inbox. I hear what you're saying but I'm sure that's not the issue. I've also got a BT account setup and that works fine.

Here's a header from the e-mail which has appeared in the Inbox. The "xxxxxxxxx" is the e-mail account from which it was sent - "yyyyyyyy" is the "To" address.

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

I have no idea why you are receiving a sent email in your inbox as I checked my Outlook 2010 and could only get it to go to the inbox if I chose that option as above.

You may need to uninstall it and reinstall it as it may be corrupt.

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

I had a few mins yesterday so Googled about a fair bit in a bid to help you out. Though I came across a few cases the same, none where fixed (beyond what is common sense and what has been suggested - filters, groups etc). Some did ask if Gmail was in the mix though.. As VM are using Gmail's platform that kind of rang bells, but I still found no answer. I'd suggest as Masque does to reinstall Outlook, but also to go into your VM webmail and check everything's hunky dory in the 'settings' there. I'd have a go at enabling (and then disabling if necessary) IMAP over POP. Generally just see if you can get things to reset as there's obviously a gremlin at work.

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

Have you got any rules setup that could be duplicating any email that you send?

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

Thanks for the time spent searching - appreciated. I'll check the VM Settings again and get back to you.

Hi Tali, I do have some rules setup. They move e-mails into different folders based on who they're from. This was my first port of call because I thought I might have moved one to an invalid folder and, therefore, it defaulted to moving to the Inbox. But they all look fine.

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

I would fully uninstall it and then reinstall as it appears to be corrupt in some way.

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

OK - I toggled the IMAP setting on all of the accounts and still no joy.

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

I'm reluctant to reinstall as there are two other users who use Outlook on the same machine. But, I've found out a little more. When I press Send/Receive, one of accounts, the one I receive the sent mail into my Inbox on, is shown twice - sending and receiving.
More investigation required me thinks...

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

As I said before, I have this with Thunderbird. I just sent an email logged into web mail.

Thunderbird is set to receive emails using pop, with the recent: setting.

Thunderbird's Inbox has the mail I sent from webmail. In webmail, it's just in the sent items.

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

I'm not using webmail at all. I understand how what you say would be useful though. But it's not what's happening for me. I need to find out why Outlook is Sending/Receiving the same account twice. I've checked the Send/Receive groups and there is only one with all the accounts in once. I've exported and then deleted all of my rules and it still happens. Maybe, as Masque suggests, there is some corruption. I'll have another play this weekend. Thanks for all your input.

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

The only I can emulate this with my own copy is to choose leave in Inbox which it will do unless I then choose Sent Items so if that is not the issue the install may be corrupt as that is the only setting I can find that could potentially do that.

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

I've got the same symptoms with my GMail and Outlook 2010 (VM use the GMail platform), every sent mail appears in the Inbox as well with the tag [IMAP/Sent]. It's never really bothered me so I haven't bothered finding out why it's the case but if I do I'll let you know...

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

So it happens with IMAP as well not just POP3 so another puzzler thanks for the input.:)

I can make it happen and reverse it as previously mentioned and my email address is @blueyonder.co.uk but I doubt that matters.

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

Technically it's happening with SMTP - which is used with both POP3 and IMAP.

IMAP and POP3 are both "receiving" protocols, and can only retrieve and manipulate mail from a server, they cannot be used to send mail.

SMTP is required in conjunction with both to actually send mail. Note that sending email isn't the same as putting a copy of an email onto the server, as this can be done with IMAP - I think it's the redundancy in systems that's causing it.

When a client (i.e. Outlook) sends email, it will send the email via SMTP, and then *also* if configured to do so upload a copy of the email via IMAP to a specific folder (e.g. sent items). SMTP doesn't actually have any concept of accounts or mailboxes or folders (it's named Simple mail transfer protocol after all) and can work completely separately from your email account. For example, I can use Google's SMTP server to send email from my work account, and vice versa.

Therefore, you can use a different SMTP server to the IMAP server to send mail, and for that reason some SMTP servers *automatically* take the email as you're sending it and copy it to the sent folder. I think this is what's causing the duplication here.

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

Admittedly it is an odd one and I have Outlook 2010 and could not find a single reason for it to happen unless I told it to put it in the Inbox rather than the Sent items which was easily reversed, which is why my thoughts went to a corrupt install, what are your thoughts on that.

I would probably just do the same as you and leave it alone as it is no real issue more of a puzzle.

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

It's an issue for me. I don't want every e-mail I send to be passed around VM and sent back to me. It's not right and I want a fix. Whether it's at my end or VM's end. (Don't start me off on a VM/GoogleMail rant)

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

I do not believe that it received rather just goes straight to the Inbox rather than the Sent items folder, as I said above I can make mine do that and then stop it by choosing the correct folder as I have explained above but you said it does not work when you tried to do the same.

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

Badders, have you tried using webmail to send an email? Just curious if like me with Thunderbird, if you do that, the email appears in your Outlook's inbox.

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

Yes, you're right - two emails get sent - one to the receipient and one to the VM sending address.

These are my settings:

[img]Download Failed (1)[/img]

I thought it might be "Keep Virgin Media Mail's copy in the Inbox"? but setting it to delete still sends two copies

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

They are the default settings and mine is set to exactly the same and my Outlook 2010 does not do the same action as your account seems to do as mine puts Sent mail in the Sent mail folder.

Webmail does not have any effect on Outlook 2010 whatsoever.

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

Exactly, that's what I was trying to show, i.e. Badders has same issue as me, email client is irrelevent, the problem is not with client.

There seems to be something odd about our actual ntl email accounts when we send mail, but seems unlikely our accounts are only ones effected.

the sent item doesn't appear in the inbox in webmail.

I close thunderbird, used 1 of my ntl webmail addresses to send to another ntl webmail.
as expected, the sending wbemail has everything as it should, i.e. nothing new in inbox, email in sent

in web mail the recipient email, has received the email as expected

open thunderbird, the email is downloaded twice, once from sender, once from recipient. I think it downloads it from the sender as it's a recent, new email in the sender's account, but pop just puts it in inbox, rather than sent where it would go if using imap.

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

Great. I thought I was the only one with this issue. Thanks admars for confirming I wasn't losing my marbles.
Now how to get it fixed...

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

I've done a little more investigation and my explanation earlier was pretty much spot on.

With IMAP, when you send an email, your client uploads a copy of the email to the server in the folder you specify - e.g. "Sent items". However, this is NOT the actual sent items folder on Gmail platforms.

IMAP folders work as an overlay on the GMail platform, as it doesn't actually use "Folders" but "Labels" instead. There are actually "System" folders - "Sent Mail", "Drafts", etc. but these need to be accessed differently. If you set your client to just save sent messages in "Sent Items" Gmail will put those messages in the Inbox with the label "IMAP/Sent Items" on it.

You have to set your client to save messages into the actual "Sent Mail" system folder instead, accessed under the [Gmail] subtree:

http://qasdfdsaq.com/images/sentmail.png

In short: as the GMail platform remaps IMAP folders to labels, putting a message into any folder other than those under the [Gmail] tree will cause it to end up in the Inbox with the folder name as a label instead.

Mind you if you read Google's instructions on recommended settings they say you shouldn't set your client to save sent messages to the server as it's done automatically by the SMTP server (as I mentioned earlier) but YMMV for Virgin Mail:

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/a...y?answer=78892

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

I'm not sending/receiving through IMAP on any of my accounts. All of my accounts have IMAP disabled. It's all POP/SMTP.

I'm not sure whether you're saying it's a hidden consequence of GMAIL's SMTP implementation?

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

Well the SMTP implementation will put it in your sent items automatically, I'm not sure how it's ending up in your Inbox via POP3 though, since POP3 doesn't have a mechanism for uploading messages back up to a folder on the server. Does it show up with a label at all in your Inbox?

It's a bit puzzling, but I would still recommend switching to IMAP but that said I don't think the problem's unsolvable with POP3. What account setup have you got for sending mail? i.e. what username, server, etc.

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

As mentioned above, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the client. If I send an e-mail from web-mail, two e-mails are sent out. One to the recipient and one back to the account it was sent from. If you're using a pc client (Outlook or Thunderbird for example) this would be received into your Inbox.

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

Sorry, got confused with the other people posting similar problems in the same thread. I'll give this another look when I get home, but I don't use POP3 so the usefulness may be limited.

Is there are particular reason you're using POP3 instead of IMAP?

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

Mainly because I know it and use it work. I haven't got time to gen up on IMAP and it used to work fine with VM. It's all gone a bit strange since the move to Google mail.

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

I wonder if I can revise this thread. I am interested because my reading of it is that in certain circumstances if you use POP3 and you send an email from Outlook using the Virgin SMTL server, a copy of the sent email is retained on your PC and also on the sent folder ion the Virgin server where you can see it by going into Virgin webmail. Is that correct?

Many thanks.

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

I think this very much depends on your settings, there are some Virgin settings that won't store a copy on the webmail and some that will.

It has nothing to do with your POP3 (incoming) settings and everything to do with your SMTP (outgoing) settings.

That said, if you use IMAP then it might synchronise the sent emails regardless.

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

I believe this has long been a feature of the GMail platform, if you send via a Google-powered SMTP server it'll place a copy of sent messages into your sentbox.

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

This is correct, however the problem is that Virgin has different SMTP settings to support the old legacy blueyonder/ntl accounts and they don't always go through Google. It never even used to require a log in to use, it just checked if you were on a BY/NTL IP. I'm not sure if that's been "Fixed" though but if not and someone's still using the unauthenticated SMTP server, there's no way to know which account sent the email.

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

I just had a look at one of my old ntlworld.com accounts and there's no mail in the webmail sent box after 2012 which is the year they migrated it to google IIRC. I am using SSL and authentication on the SMTP server (virginmedia.com) settings

Re: Sent e-mails also appearing in Inbox
 

In that case, it implies that Virgin's SMTP servers bypass Google entirely.