I don’t know if it’s my anti-virus getting a grip onvirus ridden e-mails, but I am getting a lot of “unknown error” messages in Windows Live Mail when I try to delete or move to junk, spam mails with attachments.

I was somewhat frustrated by this, as it leaves my inbox littered with junk… I have however found a solution by accident which works, so thought I’d pass it on!

Solution: Simply right click on the mail in question and select properties…. yes, you’ll get another error message (“The properties of this message could not be displayed”)… BUT, if you now try to delete, or move the mail to junk, it WILL work!

Assumption of the situation: I assume the issue is that the mails in question have viruses (I assume this), and that my virus scanner is grabbing them and deleting or quaratining the .eml file behind the mail (I certainly do get a virus found message when replicating such mails). Windows Live Mail is probably therefore screaming because it has the mail in its index, but can’t find the .eml in the file system to remove as part of the delete or move. The selection of properties (again, I assume) must create a placeholder .eml or other reference that allows the original move or delete function to happily perform against that mail.

Hope that proves handy to someone!