Ease my paranoia and give me a reasonable explanation

[sherilocks]

Just for starters, I have windows xp sp2 installed and I have earthlink cable hispeed. I use the earthlink total access mail program.

All was working flawlessly until 5 pm, yesterday 11/18.

Suddenly the messages would not download, even tho the indicator showed 4 messaages. I would click the appropriate button, the little voice said "mailtruck" and all the right bells and stuff were fine. But "no new messages" was indicated at the bottom of the screen. Not to worry, I figured something was wrong at earthlink.

This went on until this morning. I went directly to Earthlink to download my messages there. I was refused access to my mail and I wish I could remember the exact wording, but I just figured that Earthlink was still having a problem.

I did all the things I usually do when something doesn't work, turn the computer on and off, check help screens, etc. Still no e-mail, although I was now showing 22 messages on the indicator. At this point my web browser was beginning to hang, but I fixed that by turning off the e-mail program.

I finally called Earthlink. After a lengthy process of do this, do that, still nothing worked. The helper person took me back to the e-mail at Earthlink.net, which now worked. There were the usual e-mails, but at the bottom of the list, there were two e-mails from Bev Harris at Black Box Voting dated 11/14 and highlighted in yellow. Between 11/14 and 11/18 I had been getting my e-mails, no problem. I deleted the two BBV messages and the e-mail system wnet back to normal.

What would have caused that? I just hope that Agent Mike isn't afoot here. If the system had just hung immediately on the two BBV e-mails, I wouldn't have given it a second thought. But why the delayed hang-up on the part of my e-mail program? A rational explanation would help a lot.