Retaining emails whilst moving into temporary accomodation

[#1]

Hi, I was due to move house just before Christmas and was going to transfer my Plusnet account over to the new property. However the vendors withdrew their property from the market just before exchange of contracts. I am now going to complete on the sale of my flat and temporarily move in with family whilst I look for a new property. Is there any way I can retain access to my Plusnet email account whilst I'm in temporary accomodation, and if not, could anyone advise on the best way to save all my current emails? I currently have my emails set up with IMAP. Thanks in advance.

[#2]

Hiya @Cinammon, thanks for getting in touch.

I am really sorry to hear about the issues with your house move, especially at such a busy time of year too!

If you are needing to cancel your account in the meantime until you have a new property lined up, you can call and discuss this with our Customer Options Team, they are contactable directly on 0800 013 2632 and they are open between the following hours:

Monday - Friday: 08:00 - 20:00
Saturday: 09:00 - 19:00
Sunday: 09:00 - 18:00

Just ensure to ask the team to keep your account as mail only after closure. It is really important that you do ask the team for this, otherwise the account will just close and mail will be lost.

With regards to your emails, whilst your account changes to mail only you may lose the service for a couple of days whilst the mail is recreated. We can ask that any mail you had before the account change is restored but it is always advisable to back up any important mail. If using a mail client, some of these do have the option for archiving I believe (though our forum users may be able to offer you some better support on this).

I hope this helps and if you do have any further queries, please do get back to us.

[#3]

Email only accounts

When your account is cancelled, any additional services you have such as email, web-space, cgi-service, etc. will stop working. If you want to retain your email service after your account is closed, you must advise Plusnet before the account is closed. There used to be a charge for email only accounts, but they are now free of charge.

Resurrecting an account as email only requires manual intervention from both yourself and Plusnet. The initial stage in account resurrection gets the default email address restored. You then need to setup any secondary Plusnet email address(es) yourself, at which point you'll be able to once again send and receive emails from those addresses.

If you have secondary email address(es), after you have recreated those email addresses, you will need to ask that their contents are restored by updating the existing thread or try posting on the generic email restore topic. Please note that these backups are kept for 30 days only.

The process should go something like this...

1. Prior to your account being closed, you must tell Plusnet that after your account is closed you wish to retain the account as email only - contact the Customer Options Team - agents receive few requests for this, so if there are any doubts refer the agent to KBMS article #3349
2. You need to make a note of all of your Plusnet email address(es) by going to manage my mail at https://plus.net/email
3. Your account is terminated
4. Plusnet resurrect the account as email only
5. Plusnet will restore the default mailbox - you might need to change the name before the @ symbol to what you had before
6. You recreate any secondary email address(es) and then request that their contents are restored
7. Plusnet restore the secondary mailbox(es) content

Everything should then work as it did previously, however please note that emails sent to the email address(es) between the account being closed and the email addresses being recreated might...

1. Be returned to the sender as un-routable (no such domain)
2. Be returned to the sender as undelivered (no such addressee)
3. All be delivered to the default mailbox if catch-all is enabled

[#4]

That's great, thanks Lauren. Is there any guidance anywhere on how to back up email?

[#5]

That's really helpful, thank you @Townman .

[#6]

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@Cinammon wrote:

That's great, thanks Lauren. Is there any guidance anywhere on how to back up email?

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that depends on how you access your mail - webmail only or via a client - which one? and which protocol IMAP or POP3?

There is no guidance as the variable factors are too numerous.

[#7]

Thanks, I'm using Outlook and IMAP.

[#8]

In that case, there should be an archive function in Outlook, but I can't help with that  as I haven't used M$ programs for years.

[#9]

If you mean Outlook as installed ON a computer (as opposed to Outlook.com accessed via a browser), you can create local data files to store whatever you want.

See New Item (New Email pull-down) -> More Items... -> Outlook Data File...

This will create a new "container" in the left hand panel, which is purely LOCAL the content of which cannot be accessed from other IMAP devices.  Therefore rather than moving the content of your IMAP mailbox to there, COPY them, leaving them still on the server.

You should create folders within the local data file to reflect the folders on the server.  Then select all of the mail items in each of the IMAP folders and drag them to the local data file folder, WHILST HOLDING THE CTRL KEY down.  This will COPY the items rather than MOVE them to the local data file.  A copy rather than a move, leaves them on the server and thus accessible on other devices (email on your phone?), also moving them will remove them from the IMAP server and they WILL NOT BE RESTORED after the account is changed to mail only.

NB: Outlook's archive tools also REMOVE items from the (inbox) IMAP folder.