Where have my emails gone?

[#1]

I went to find an email from about a month ago this morning on my ipad, only to discover that on both my ipad and my phone there's only a few emails showing, just from 11 October.

I tried webmail, only to discover exactly the same thing there. Anything older has vanished from the Inbox! Plenty of emails in Deleted, but only 30-odd in the Inbox. Emails are arriving and being downloaded as normal.

Is this account specific, or more widespread? How can I get my emails back?

[#2]

Have you gone over the storage quota and you emails been archived ?

[#3]

How do I check? I can't remember how! And how do I get my recent emails back?

Edit: found some settings, but still don't understand why all my recent emails should have been deleted without warning. Or how I get them back. Or what said settings would say if I had too many!

[#4 · Accepted solution]

@Tigger 

Given that you cannot see older emails on Webmail suggests that this is not a setting in the email client(s) on the iPhone (or other device).

Plusnet email services have a 1GB storage allowance shared across all mailboxes.  When that allowance reaches 75% utilisation, a report is added to the account's ticket history (see the link below) and a warning email sent to the account contact email address registered against the account.

75% and above utilisation reports are sent every week whilst that threshold is exceeded.  When utilisation exceeds 100% two further warnings are sent at one week intervals.  If not action is taken, one week later the largest mailbox(es) is(are) archived to bring the utilisation below 100%.

So some questions to explore ...

1. Did you see those warning emails and if you did, what did you do about the warnings?
2. If you did not see the emails are there tickets in your account's history?
3. If there are tickets in the account's history, do you monitor the email address they were recorded as being notified to?

If there is no evidence of the utilisation warning and subsequent archiving, then you need to consider the possibility of a POP3 client removing the content of your inbox.  Note that a POP3 client only accesses in the inbox folder.

Do you have another device configured as POP3 rather than IMAP?  If yes, does that POP3 client have "retain on server for one month (or the like) set?

If you cannot find evidence of the mailbox being archived** and you do not intentionally have a POP3 client configured, I would consider the possibility of a third party having hacked the mailbox and ran a POP3 client against it to 'harvest' its content.  Changing the password on the mailbox (and anywhere else you have used the same email address / password combination) ASAP.

** There is one archive condition which leaves no visibility in the ticket system - that is where the mailbox has not being accessed for 90+ days.  In such circumstances there is a very visible email in the mailbox which states that the contents have been archived due to inactivity.  If that were the case, I think you would have mentioned it ... so that can reasonably be ruled out.

[#5]

[quote] does that POP3 client have "retain on server for one month (or the like) set? [/quote]

Ah. That was it - I've got a new laptop and must have missed that when setting up.

Plusnet will be happy, I've managed to empty my inbox on the server! I'm not so happy, means I now have a lot of emails with only one copy, which is sat on my laptop. Some of them important, too.

[#6]

All is not lost.

You can stop the laptop POP3 client from syncing.

Then create an IMAP client account on the laptop - get that configured and working.

Then the emails you really need to keep AND have access to on the other devices can be dragged from the POP3 local folder to the IMAP inbox folder.

Anything sent on the POP3 configuration will ONLY be on the laptop - you might want to move those to the IMAP sent folder too.

Having IMAP everywhere is the only safe strategy.  That said you also need good housekeeping - cull the rubbish and after that implement your own local archiving strategy, supported by a good back up plan.  One sound approach is to create a local mail folder in your email client, the data file for which you locate in a cloud based folder (Dropbox, OneDrive ... etc.).  Then move emails you want to keep forever into that folder.  At that point they will not be available on other devices, but they will be archived locally, with a cast-iron back-up strategy, protected against the total loss of your local disk drive.

Note: With IMAP, you only ever have one copy which is held on the server - each IMAP client is synching with the copy - delete it on one device and it is gone from all of them.

HTH.

[#7]

Hi 

Sorry for butting in, I can send from my webmail account to external accounts on Plusnet, but I am no longer receiving emails from external accounts. Am I missing something, and is there anything I can do about it?