Emails received multiple times

[sblott]

Our business account was 'upgraded' to Office 365 this week and since then we've received the same emails 3 or 4 times. I'm using Outlook 2010 on Windows 7 and used the settings given on this website. It appears that the system is not detecting that messages have already been received on this computer. I need to have the "leave a copy of messages on the server" option ticked as I wish to receive my emails at both my home and office computer, but only once! I have read and deleted the same 200 emails at least 4 times, and I have just received all 200 emails AGAIN! This is only a problem when using Outlook on a desktop computer: I have only received one copy of messages to my iphone. What is happening???

[sblott]

Further to the post above, I have spoken to the Helpdesk, and they have confirmed that after adding the new Office 365 account to Outlook 2010, you need to delete the old btconnect.com account. This was not included in the instructions, and will be corrected in due course.

All emails sent to the old btconnect.com address are being forwarded to the new Office 365 address, so there is no need to check btconnect.com e-mails separately. The old btconnect.com log-in to manage services is also redundant.

All this should have been made clear BEFORE the switchover!

[rivalchild]

I'm glad you got it fixed Simon. A couple of things to note. Some mail clients, namely Mac Mail and Windows Live Mail, actually delete all the emails associated with an account if you were to remove it. Also, removing the account can be problematic depending on how the account was originally set up as it could potentially delete the PST file which holds all your emails.

I agree that the email isn't worded very well and for that I apologize. I think it should really ask you to amend the current account instead of adding a new one which is what we normally do here if someone calls up.

Just for anyone else reading this thread; clearing out the old mail box would also have resolved the issue as well and it also avoids a lot of the issues I've mentioned here. You can also disable the account or stop the mail client from checking the mailbox when you use send and receive.

[sblott]

Sorry, that is incorrect. The ONLY way to stop the problem was to delete the old btconnect account entirely. Clearing out all the messages in the old mailbox only solved half the problem. With the btconnect.com account residing within Outlook 2010 it was somehow influencing the new Office 365 account, and caused duplicate emails from the new account to arrive. So long as the old account existed within Outlook, I kept receiving every email again which was sent to the Office 365 AFTER the switchover. The only way to have stopped this would have been to delete every email whenever it was received (i.e. do not tick the 'Leave a copy of messages on the server').

Sorry, my company has been wrestling with this issue for the past week, with some very angry people. I want to make it clear that this was a serious problem, created by BT, which has cost me a lot of time and hastle. This should have been fully tested before forcing this on customers.

[rivalchild]

Which is why you can disable the account or at the very least stop outlook from checking the account during send and receive. I appreciate that deleting it worked for you Simon but other people might have their accounts set up differently and advising them to delete the account entirely could cause a loss of emails.

Again, sorry for all the hassle this has caused you and your business.

[Sepping]

I had the same problem, only I was using Windows Live Mail. It kept on loading multiple copies of my BT Mail every time I used it. I gave up in the end. But I'd like to go back to using WLM if a solution is found.