When checking my email a few unopened messages always go directly into the Deleted Items folder. Why is this happening?

Since you mentioned the folder name “Deleted Items” in your question I assume that you are using Outlook Express as your email client. There are a few reasons why messages could be going directly into the Deleted Items folder. The first reason is there is a rule which has been setup in Outlook Express specifying that any messages which meet a certain criteria should be moved into the Deleted Items folder. Such a rule may have been established to deal with a certain type of spam message or other unwanted emails. To check whether any rules have been established in Outlook Express go to the “Tools” menu > “Message Rules” > “Mail”. If a window appears automatically titled “New Mail Rule” this means that there are no mail rules, and Outlook Express is requesting that you create a new rule. Since there are no current mail rules, obviously there is no rule which would be moving the messages directly into the Deleted Items folder. However, if a different window appears with a list of mail rules then it is highly likely that one of the listed rules is causing the messages to be moved. To test this theory, disable (untick) all the listed mail rules and click OK. Once this has been done, check whether the problem continues. If not, then one of those rules was causing the problem. In this case, re-enable the rules one-by-one, each time checking whether the problem re-occurs. Using this process you should be able to determine which message rule is causing the problem, and you can then keep that rule disabled or modify the rule to avoid the current behaviour.

However, if there are no message rules implemented which seem to be causing this behaviour then another possible cause could be spam filtering software that is running on your computer. This spam filtering software would be scanning your incoming email, deeming some of the messages as spam, and then moving them into the Deleted Items folder. This may not necessarily be a bad thing, since the spam filter is doing exactly what the spam filter should be doing. However, this could create problems if the spam filter is too aggressive and moving legitimate email messages into the Deleted Items folder. To test whether this is the problem, disable any spam filtering software which is running on the computer. Once this has been done, check whether the problem persists. Assuming that the problem does not continue, the spam filter has been causing the messages to automatically move into the Deleted Items folder. If you are finding that the spam filter is deleting legitimate emails, then you will need to reduce the aggressiveness of the spam filter to avoid these emails being mistakenly tagged as spam. The exact procedure for this depends on the specific spam filtering software which is installed on your computer, so I can’t provide a step-by-step procedure for changing the spam filter settings. However, if you do have difficulty changing these settings yourself then please let me know the spam filtering software which you are using and I will try to provide additional advice so that you can change the relevant settings.