Joined
·
9,932 Posts
About a week ago I found that my AOL email had some kind of virus which Norton didn't catch in the quick scan, but luckily was able to remove when I did a thorough full-system scan.
I would never have known about it if I hadn't checked my "sent mail" folder to see whether I had remembered to mention something in a specific email. At the time I checked, the last few emails I had sent all included attachments (some just text and some with photos). Curiously, NONE of those showed up in the sent folder. Neither did emails from a few days earlier that had had attachments. Other emails (without attachments) did. After some frantic searching and contacting several people to find out whether they had received the attachments I sent, it turned out that none of my emails with attachments had been sent, but as far as I know all the ones without had been sent just fine.
There was NO error message when I sent them, and of course I'm not in the habit of checking the sent folder after every time I send something just to make sure it went out.
Once I realized it, I called AOL support, thinking it was a problem at their end, and they suggested a virus scan.... which fixed it. But all emails within the past month or so that had attachments are GONE -- they weren't sent, and no copy was saved in any folder. So it's been something of a hassle to reconstruct what emails with attachments I sent during that time, and to whom.
Soooo.... just a little warning to AOL users... if you send something with a text file or picture attached, check your sent folder to make sure it's actually going somewhere and not disappearing into a black hole!
I would never have known about it if I hadn't checked my "sent mail" folder to see whether I had remembered to mention something in a specific email. At the time I checked, the last few emails I had sent all included attachments (some just text and some with photos). Curiously, NONE of those showed up in the sent folder. Neither did emails from a few days earlier that had had attachments. Other emails (without attachments) did. After some frantic searching and contacting several people to find out whether they had received the attachments I sent, it turned out that none of my emails with attachments had been sent, but as far as I know all the ones without had been sent just fine.
There was NO error message when I sent them, and of course I'm not in the habit of checking the sent folder after every time I send something just to make sure it went out.

Once I realized it, I called AOL support, thinking it was a problem at their end, and they suggested a virus scan.... which fixed it. But all emails within the past month or so that had attachments are GONE -- they weren't sent, and no copy was saved in any folder. So it's been something of a hassle to reconstruct what emails with attachments I sent during that time, and to whom.
Soooo.... just a little warning to AOL users... if you send something with a text file or picture attached, check your sent folder to make sure it's actually going somewhere and not disappearing into a black hole!