e mail avalanche

Not sure if this is the right forum, but hopefully some one can help me. I have a small business website and e mail server with 1 and 1. The email account is set up as a POP account and I view it on my computer using Outlook 2003. I delete uneeded mail in Outlook, but leave it on the server as a record. I also set up my SE 850 mobile phone through my T mobile account so that I could download the email to that if I wished. However this was quite tricky to do and I gave up actually downloading any of the mail to the phone more than two years ago. My T mobile account was terminated today and I lost the connection at about 4pm and am currently waiting for 02 to connect me. I just opened Outlook and it is now trying to re download every e mail that I deleted from my computer but not from the server. Any idea why this should happen, and more importantly how I can stop it as we are talking the best part of a thousand messages

Close Outlook.

Go to your mail server via a webmail service - do 1 and 1 have one themselves? - if not register with one of the the free email web services, web2mail (I think) is one. Then go to your email box via a web browser and tidy the box.

Though this may be too late by now.

I do occassionally tidy the box via webmail but I'm probably going to have to go in via the web mail server and delete the entire inbox to stop the mountain of mail heading my way. Its not too big a deal as I have a second back up whereby all the messages are forwarded to another mailbox which is only accessable via webmail. However I am puzzled as to why it has happened. It obviously has something to do with the T mobile termination this afternoon, but I can't think why.

To be honest I've often mused how 'the system' knows when Outlook has downloaded but not deleted the emails, to avoid (in normal circumstances) downloading them again. Is that information held on the Oulook client by message Id, or does the server know which clients, and where form, the emails have been downloaded?

I truly don't know.

It was actually worse than I first thought. It had also downloaded duplicates of every e mail that was stored in Outlook. I now have an Outlook inbox with over 800 e mails in it - about half of them duplicates.

I think Outlook 2010 would not have done that: http://www.howto-outlook.com/faq/duplicates.htm