Can a computer tech person help me please?

[jamesray50]

All day today my email has been hanging up. I use Windows Live. It will download around 20 or so and then stop and I get a message that the server has stopped, do I want to retry or stop. I usually stop and several minutes I hit send/receive again and it does the same thing again. I usually get 100 emails every 2 hours or so. This has been aggravating.

So while ago I decided to reboot my computer and when it came back on it said the it took more than 10 seconds for the scripts to load and that I could go to properties - scripts to change them. Well, I can't find them and don't know what scripts are. I looked in the help file and Googled it and couldn't make sense of anything I read.

I have Windows 7. Does anyone have any suggestions for me. Thank you in advance.

[vangogh]

It might not be anything on your end. If you're getting a message that the server has stopped that might mean the issue is on the server. As annoying as it is you could wait a day or so and see if it fixes itself. Failing that you may want to call your webhost if these are emails through your domain. If they're free accounts like gmail or yahoo and things haven't fixed themselves in a day or so then digging into Windows Live is probably what you'll need to do. Sorry I can't help with that though. I'm on a Mac and have never used Windows Live before.

[jamesray50]

Actually my email is through my internet company but I access it through Windows Live. I don't understand how it works. I can log on to my internet account and get my email that way or through Windows Live. It confuses me. This is on my laptop. On my desktop I use Outlook. It's an old machine that my former employer had given to me a few years ago and it was already installed. I haven't checked to see if I have the same problem on that machine. I'll check it tomorrow.

[vangogh]

Definitely check on the other machine. If you're having problems on that one too then it's like your ISP that's the issue. If the other machine has no email problem then it probably is Windows Live.

It's normal to be able to get your email both through Windows Live or Outlook and through your internet account. The mail was delivered to a server at the internet company. When you use Windows Live or Outlook you're just telling the program to go find the server where my mail is and download it so I can read it here.

[Harold Mansfield]

The issue is hard to determine because what you are actually doing is using 2 different servers to get your mail.
If your email is Windows Live, but you are accessing it through your ISP (or the other way around), then you are reliant on 2 different servers to access you email.
One is the actual email server where the email account is and the other is a second party that is pulling your emails from that account.

If the error message is "server down"...it could be Windows Live, or it could be your ISP. Neither has anything to do with you or your computer.
The internet is actually kind of fragile in a way in that it relies on many different things to work together. Any interruption between you, your connection, your email server, your computer...all the way down to your mouse batteries can interrupt the flow.
It is not unheard of for Windows Mail to go down. It happens. Happens to everyone every now and then.

My recommendation is to use one way to access your email.

If going to Windows Live direct is easier with Windows 7, then by pass your ISP's home page or where ever it is that you are accessing it from.

As far as your reboot and the message about the scripts, that is a separate issue. Make sure that you are using the most up to date version of what ever browser you are using ( IE, FF, Safari, etc) and if you are using XP on that computer, make sure that you have the most current service patches.

[billbenson]

If you have a second computer set up another email program on it like thunderbird, outlook express etc. Add your email accounts to it and set the server up to download the messages but leave them on the server. That way you can see if it works on a different machine not using windows live.

Its a bit of a pain to do this, but you will find that from time to time problems like this arise. It helps to have a way to test it.

To me your problem sounds like either your ISP or host is limiting the bandwidth of downloads. Hard to tell which ones. I'd contact both of them and complain. See which one comes up with a solution first. Sometimes in these things you will get finger pointing between the ISP and the host which makes it even more difficult and time consuming to solve.

Oh, if you are getting that many emails I'm assuming a good percentage are spam. Something helpful for that is to turn on SpamAssassin on the email section of the control panel of your site. It works really well catching 80% or more of your spam before it is even sent to your computer.

@eborg - how does windows live work? The way you describe it your emails go through a server at MS. What does windows live do? Rember I use Linux so I'm behind the times as to how windows functions these days.

[Harold Mansfield]

@eborg - how does windows live work? The way you describe it your emails go through a server at MS. What does windows live do? Rember I use Linux so I'm behind the times as to how windows functions these days.

Couldn't tell you. I don't use it. I have all of my accounts coming through Outlook from my own email server , and Gmail. I was just offering solutions based on what she described. I assume it works much like Hotmail, which is 3rd party like the rest of them, but it allows you to import other email accounts into it like Outlook Express used to. As far as I know it is still dependent on Microsoft's mail servers.

[billbenson]

Interesting. I assumed it was just the latest version of Outlook. Hotmail does do a good job of spam filtering from what I have seen. Haven't used that in years though either.

[jamesray50]

I ended up calling my ISP. When I logged on my mail account through them I had over 5000 emails in my inbox, 15% capacity of my allowable storage. They told me that I needed to periodically delete them, but they didn't really understand why I was having the problem I was having. They had me delete my email account and set it back up exactly the way it was. It's working fine now. When I logged back in Windows Live it started downloading my emails. And downloading. And downloading. And then I realized it was going to download everything on the mail server so I closed it and went back to my ISP mail account and started deleting my emails. But, there were only 20 emails on a page and I couldn't find anywhere to change it or how to mark all of them, so I was deleting 20 at a time. Finally my friend called me and I told him what I was doing and he showed me where I could change the view to 100 per page, so that made deleting them so much quicker. I have changed the settings on my ISP mail to delete when I log out. This has been a non productive day for me.

[vangogh]

I've had to do the same thing before. It's no fun. You can probably set up Windows Live to delete emails on the server after you've downloaded them or a week after downloading them. That way at least some of the email on the server gets deleted without you having to remember. The server will still collect the spam that doesn't get delivered to you so you'll still have to delete email periodically, but at least it won't be as bad.

On the bright side your email should be working again and you learned something new about how email works. :)

[Harold Mansfield]

Jamesray, don't feel out of the loop or non-tech. We have ALL gone through email issues in the past and it sucks. That's how we know what to say to you now.

It is frustrating, but like VG said, the bright side is that you will be able to troubleshoot in the future.