I am not a computer expert but can use email program. Recently I had laptop crash and had to reload windows XP and all drivers. I have 2 computers a PC and laptop. Both on BT broadband and using BT/Yahoo email with 4 addresses. I contacted BT and asked about using Microsoft Outlook as my email program on the laptop. The advisor said yes, and talked me through the setup. Now the laptop has emails, all 4 addresses. But contact list has dissapeared. Also old emails from one address vanished. When trying to use the BT/Yahoo email on the PC, all previous emails dissapeared on all 4 email addresses. The BT advisor said do not load the BT Broadband disk onto laptop. I still log on to the internet on the PC with a specific email address.(The BT broadband window that opes first). I dont do that on laptop. In Outlook, I went into email accounts and changed the display name so I could see which address was which. before, it was just mail.btinternet(1) for example. One other had no number, the other was (2). Doing this created new accounts with the new names, now I have 6. It appears that all emails after the change go to the renamed addresses. I dont want to lose all my old emails or my contact list. Please help. Thanks.

Are your mail accounts unique?, ie they have seperate passwords.
You can designate a 'friendly name' to each mail account
The default behaviour of a pop mail account is to download all mail, if you
want to access mail from another PC you have to set the acounts option to
leave a copy on the server.
An IMAP account doesnt require this.

Contacts; depends whether you are refering to Contacts shown when you access
your account via web access
The contacts within outlook are entirely seperate to any contacts shown in
web access.

"Andrew Spence" wrote in message
...

I am not a computer expert but can use email program. Recently I had
laptop crash and had to reload windows XP and all drivers. I have 2
computers a PC and laptop. Both on BT broadband and using BT/Yahoo
email with 4 addresses. I contacted BT and asked about using Microsoft
Outlook as my email program on the laptop. The advisor said yes, and
talked me through the setup. Now the laptop has emails, all 4
addresses. But contact list has dissapeared. Also old emails from one
address vanished. When trying to use the BT/Yahoo email on the PC, all
previous emails dissapeared on all 4 email addresses. The BT advisor
said do not load the BT Broadband disk onto laptop. I still log on to
the internet on the PC with a specific email address.(The BT broadband
page). I dont do that on laptop. In Outlook, I went into email
accounts and changed the display name so I could see which address was
which. before, it was just mail.btinternet(1) for example. One other
had no number, the other was (2). Doing this created new accounts with
the new names, now I have 6. It appears that all emails after the
change go to the renamed addresses. I dont want to lose all my old
emails or my contact list. Please help. Thanks.




--
Andrew Spence

Thank you DL. OK I am just begining to half understand the problem. Before my laptop crash we ( wife & I) had BT Broadband account with BT/Yahoo mail included. The BT broadband disk had been loaded to both computers. So on either the PC or laptop, we logged on to BT, using one of four Email addresses, each with its own unique password. Then we were looking at Internet explorer, with the BT / Yahoo page setup, so could browse the web as normal. included in the toolbar is an email tab. Clicking on this tab would open the mail, and all emails were displayed in the inbox. If we wanted to see the emails to any of our other accounts, we had to log out and in again using that name. Then we could read or send from that account. To recap, we could only use one Email account at a time. I guess that means that we have been accessing our Emails via web access, as DL mentions in his reply?
I suppose I will have to telephone BT and ask where the 'old' Emails are stored and if I can have them back, please? The trouble is, that it was BT advisor who said there would be no problems in me changing to Microsoft Outlook. He never mentioned we might lose the existing Emails from the PC which was not using Outlook, but, as before, the BT/Yahoo accounts.

Contacts: Thank you DL, I assume that in Outlook the list is stored on my computer? And further assume that my previous contact list was stored on a server at BT? SO, If we set up the PC to use Microsoft Outlook, how do we get the contacts into Outlook, on both laptop and PC? ( I have a memory stick which goes in the USB port so can transfer files between computers).

Last question: Now I have 6 email accounts, 2 duplicates, on the laptop in Outlook. The first 4 have the emails before I made the changes to accounts, the 2 duplicates have emails recieved after that point in time. Can I delete any account without losing the emails already downloaded?
I apologise for being so stupid, but thanks to all who are helping me.