My old computer stopped working so I purchased a new laptop computer. Once the computer was setup I reactivated my old email account. However, certain emails are not displaying: it will show some sent emails, but does not show any deleted items or folders that I setup. Some people have also said that emails sent to me are bouncing back, but I am receiving some other emails. Any assistance with this issue would be appreciated.

It seems that we have two separate problems – gaining access to old email and messages bouncing which are sent to your email address. Since these are fairly discrete issues (one relating to your computer, the other potentially relating to your email provider) we will deal with them individually. First, we will deal with the issue about accessing old email. When you access your email account generally you will use an email client on the computer, such as Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail, Thunderbird, Mac Mail, etc. When you check your email it downloads your email to the local computer and then removes the email from the server. This conserves space in your email box on the server, as messages do not accumulate – when you check your email the messages download, and delete from the server, thus freeing-up space on the server. However, the implication is that the only copy of your messages are on your local computer so you cannot access those messages from any other computers (and it also means that backup is especially important, since if that computer suffers a hardware failure or other data corruption then the emails are lost).

From your question, when you setup your email account on the new computer it seems that you just setup the email account (i.e. input your email server details, username, password, etc) and did not migrate the email from your old computer across to the new computer. This means that you will not have access to any of the old email on your new computer because the old email is only located on your old computer, together with all of the folder structures and email filing which you conducted on that computer. Thus, when you setup the email account on your new computer it proceeded to download any new emails located on your email server and that’s it. In order to gain access to your old email you will need to migrate that email across from your old computer. Unfortunately this process is likely to be complicated for two reasons. First, your old computer stopped working which could make the retrieval of the data a difficult task. Second, as you have setup the email account on your new computer already (and downloaded new messages) you simply cannot copy the old mail store (database) files across to your new computer since that will overwrite the mail store files on your new computer which currently contain all your new email messages. Instead, you will need to merge the old and new mail store files together so that both the old email and new email are retained.

Given the two complications in migrating and merging the email between the old and new computers I would recommend that you take your computer to a technician to have this procedure completed. This will make the process much easier and more likely to succeed than attempting the operations yourself.

Moving onto your next question regarding the emails bouncing back. This is more of a mystery since some emails are getting through whereas other messages are being rejected. The most obvious explanation for this issue is that the senders are mistyping your email address. However, this is probably unlikely since the senders would have sent emails to your address before and since this problem occurs for multiple senders, it is more widespread than one person mistyping the address. An interesting explanation for the problem could surface if the problem only happens when a person replies to your email messages. If this is the case then it’s possible that the “reply to” or “from” address which you set for your emails is incorrect. As you have not mentioned which email client you are using I cannot provide step-by-step instructions for checking this possibility, but you should go into the account settings for your email account and double-check that your “from” address (and reply to address, if set) are typed correctly.

If everything seems alright, but the intermittent problem remains, then we really need to see the bounce messages which the senders are receiving to determine the cause of the problem. While many bounce messages have quite a bit of computer jargon-like text, they generally do give you a fairly plain one-line explanation as to the cause of the problem. If this is something like “recipient unknown” then the issue is a mistyped email address. The address should be included in the bounce report so you can tell how it has been mistyped and advise the sender to make the necessary correction(s). On the other hand, if the message is something like “recipient mailbox full” then this indicates that your email box on the mail server is full and needs to be emptied. This could be a result of a misconfiguration in your email client (i.e. it’s not deleting emails from the server once they are downloaded). I would suggest that once you are given a bounce report, your best option will be to contact your internet service provider and they can provide you with advice on how the issue can be remedied, since they will have the best knowledge of their email system setup. If people are unable to forward you the bounce reports (as the bounce report email itself bounces!) then you may need to call someone who is not able to successfully email you and they can read the pertinent details of the bounce report to you over the phone. Alternatively, you could open a secondary free email account (using a service such a Gmail or Hotmail) and ask them to send through the report to that email account instead.