The case of the disappearing Comcast email

I just returned from helping a client install a Canon Pixma MX850 Office All-In-One Printer she purchased using the Noobie Concierge service. Part of the printer setup required a whopping 13 minute print head alignment which gave my client and I some time to chit-chat.

12 emails reported missing!

During this time, my client told me a story about something strange that happened to her when she was checking her Comcast email. She said she had 13 new messages but after reading the first message, the remaining 12 email messages disappeared.

That’s right, disappeared. She said she checked every single email folder and even refreshed the Inbox but they were gone.

I thought about this for a minute and then asked her if she had any other email software such as Outlook or Outlook Express running on her computer. She said no but then mentioned that she did use a program called Incredimail.

Sometimes techies have to play detective

The Sherlock Holmes in me immediately went to work upon hearing this and I quickly discovered a program that was running in her Windows system tray that was checking her Comcast email account every 5 minutes.

I told my client that the program checking her email every 5 minutes was probably set to pull down all of the mail off the mail server. Since that explanation wasn’t very noobie-like of me, I spent another few minutes explaining how email is really stored and delivered. Once I did this, she immediately understood why her email had disappeared.

As it turns out, as she was reading her first of 13 new Comcast email messages using her web browser, the Incredimail program hit it’s 5 minute interval and retrieved the other 12 unread messages which, due to the way the program was set up, deleted the messages from the Comcast web browser view.

Case closed

Mystery solved. But we had to decide how to remedy this so it wouldn’t happen again in the future. I gave her a couple of choices including changing the Incredimail configuration to leave email on the server but ultimately she decided to give up on the Incredimail progam and delete it from her computer.

Elementary, my dear Watson.