I have an AOL email account. (Yeah, AOL, I know. But I've had it for years and I'm too lazy to change my email address.)

I'd been successfully using OL as an email client for at least a year (although Thunderbird is generally my first choice). This week, though, I found myself unable to send or receive. Checked password, port numbers, everything, no joy. So I went to "step 2" and deleted the old user account from OL and started from scratch.

This time, though, Outlook helpfully offered to "detect" my email server settings and switched me over to POP3 - even though I'd explicitly entered IMAP in the setup. The result, you guessed it, all my emails downloaded to my hard drive and my server inbox wiped clean.

I DO NOT WANT POP3, I WANT IMAP. I am really steamed.

I've removed the infamous KB2412171 patch. I've tried deleting the account (again) and starting from scratch (again). Problem does not go away.

I couldn't find any references to the problem on this forum but from a web search it looks like a few other people have had similar problems in the past few days.

Has anybody else heard of this? Any way to fix it?

I am back to using Thunderbird and it's working fine in IMAP mode; I don't really have a pressing need to get my email through Outlook but it would be nice to have that capability. Plus I'd like to understand what went wrong.

UPDATE: After a second retry, it looks like the problem has gone away. I'd still like to know if any other users have experienced this issue, though.