@TheMotherShip1 wrote:
I am someone who thought that by simply deleting an email, it was gone. My son has now talked me through the removal process but I can't be the only twit to have thought this.
Generally speaking, when you delete something, it is gone ... eventually. However that can depend on the settings of your email client and (more importantly) the behaviour of your email client. How email works, is not really a function of the email service, but it is very much that of the email application you chose to use.
With a "properly" functioning IMAP email client, when you "delete" an email, it is MOVED to the deleted items folder. If your client is not configured to "empty the deleted items folder on exit" (or you never shut it down) then the emails will just sit there in the deleted items folder until some action deletes them entirely. Plusnet runs weekly house keeping which will clean out the deleted items folder of items deleted more than a week ago. Therefore with a "working as reasonably expected" IMAP email client, deleting an email will remove it from your mail store entirely not later than 8 days hence.
Unfortunately, not all IMAP email clients were created equally and some manage item deletion differently, even varying by different versions of the same product. Some simply MARK items as deleted (they might be greyed out or scored out) but they are NOT MOVED from the inbox NOR DELETED. Then depending on how that client works, they might not be displayed at all when the folder view is refreshed, leading to the belief that they are gone, even though they are still there. Outlook used to work like this before OL2016. To actually DELETE those items the email folders need to be compacted, also known a purging.
POP3 email clients can be even more complex. In "native" mode, POP3 clients should DOWNLOAD email items and then REMOVE them from the server, so that the server's storage allowance is never exceeded. When items are then deleted, that happens locally and what happens there ... is what happens, but has no bearing on the server. However, POP3 clients can be instructed to leave items it has downloaded, on the server. In that scenario when an item is deleted (locally) as above, it might be a bit of a lottery as to what happens with the copy it left on the server. There is therefore some risk that the server could be filling up without the user being aware.
Given that the operation of email is very much dependent on the characteristic of a user's own email client, it becomes not such a straightforward task for an email supplier to write an operational guide ... idiots' or otherwise!
Indeed you are not the first and will not be that last to believe that they do not have that much mail ... well at least in the INBOX. Items in the SENT and DELETED (trash) folders also count towards the storage utilisation. So very often it is the SENT ITEMS folder which never gets looked at ... which if one uses email to share photos is all too often the culprit for exceeding the Fair Usage Policy.
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