topic Re: Missing emails from one of my mailboxes in Email

Missing emails from one of my mailboxes

Dinalt — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 18:21:00 GMT

Hi one of the mailboxes on my account has lost a year or so emails overnight - it's the one used by my daughter she sent me a message this morning saying her email account emma@dinalt.plus.com had stopped working and her email was missing - she then updated to say it was actually working but all her mail from the last year had disappeared is there anyway it can be retrieved as she has urgent work related stuff (she's a doctor).

Regards

Re: Missing emails from one of my mailboxes

Dinalt — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 18:22:44 GMT

Thought I'd add we're don't seem to be over the mailbox limit as we haven't had any warnign emails.

Regards

Re: Missing emails from one of my mailboxes

Townman — Sat, 04 Mar 2023 00:29:58 GMT

Missing when look at from where?

What has been changed?

Was she doing email clean-up house keeping? Has the deleted items folder been checked?

Is more than one device accessing the same mailbox?

If the mailbox is being accessed by webmail, its full contents should be visible. The archiving service does not archive part of a mailbox when the accounts (not the mailbox's) FUP is exceeded.

If the mailbox is being accessed by an IMAP client, is that set to only sync the most recent N months of emails?

Re: Missing emails from one of my mailboxes

Dinalt — Sun, 05 Mar 2023 15:51:55 GMT

Hi Townman,

My daughter wasnt doing anything in particular she just went to her ‘phone and all her emails from late October til early Friday were missing from her phone (only her plusnet account lost emails, using the default ios email program). She can receive new emails but all the old ones are still missing. I looked at the webmail server and they’re still there so i copied them into a new folder the back into the main inbx and they are now back on the iphone but this means there are now 3 copies of them on the server so ill have to delete the intermediary folder. Ill have to risk the increased inbox size.

Any ideas what could have caused this / how can i stop it recurring?

Re: Missing emails from one of my mailboxes

Townman — Sun, 05 Mar 2023 16:17:56 GMT

My first reaction was that I knew the answer - the how how far back to sync setting - months / years / forever!

However on double checking (I know it used to be settable on iOS) I cannot find it. Therefore I would suspect that that the iPhone has got muddled!

On the basis that this is a IMAP account on the iPhone, I would delete the email account on the iPhone and then reconfigure it.

iPhones (as great as they are) are known for getting the sync state with the server muddled. You might wan to look at Apple's support forum for more guidance.

Re: Missing emails from one of my mailboxes

Dinalt — Wed, 17 May 2023 20:29:42 GMT

Revisiting this as I now seem to have another problem with my daughters mailbox. Despite archiving all bar 3 months of her email we are getting warning emails about the size of her mailbox stating its now at 800 mb - the last time I checked (via her laptop) its actually under 500 mb - I cleared / archived her email on Sunday yet received an email today indicating it hadnt changed at all. Not sure what els3 ai can do if the two figures are so far apart….

Re: Missing emails from one of my mailboxes

James30 — Thu, 18 May 2023 08:02:57 GMT

@Dinalt - Hi, have you check webmail @ webmail.plus.net to see if the rogue emails are there? The main mailbox uses the account username and additional mailboxes use "usernname+mailbox"

Re: Missing emails from one of my mailboxes

Dinalt — Thu, 18 May 2023 12:19:36 GMT

Hi James,

I've tried to check webmail several times and it won't give me the size of the inbox (it does say there's 980 emails in it though).

What I have noticed is that it has mails from 2021 in it despite being archived on my daughters laptop from Jan 2023 so obviously they havent synched

Re: Missing emails from one of my mailboxes

James30 — Thu, 18 May 2023 12:31:56 GMT

@Dinalt - The difference of the POP and IMAP server details that you use to set the laptop up is important. POP deletes the email from the server after downloading (unless you selected leave copy of message on server. IMAP simply views them on the server. Do you know what server you used on the laptop?

Re: Missing emails from one of my mailboxes

Dinalt — Thu, 18 May 2023 13:02:51 GMT

The laptop is set to IMAP - I thought that if the mail is removed from the laptop mailbox it should be removed from the server too ?

It's set to archive into a separate pst so surely the old mails should have migrated?

Re: Missing emails from one of my mailboxes

Dinalt — Thu, 18 May 2023 13:26:24 GMT

Thought I'd manually remove some of these emails.

The advanced webmail seems to work but is stupidly slow. The basic email allowed me to delete 50 or so emails and now doesn't work. Update its finally worked but the last tab of emails (which are the oldest ones I decided to keep after the cull are all showing as no date and nothing in the subject line so it's not indexing correctly

Re: Missing emails from one of my mailboxes

James30 — Thu, 18 May 2023 13:50:19 GMT

It's likely due to the capacity issue we have, at busy times of the day webmail fails to load or loads slowly, you tend to not notice it on the client as it won't time out like webmail does.

Re: Missing emails from one of my mailboxes

Dinalt — Thu, 18 May 2023 14:35:45 GMT

Have to say using webmail is a tedious way of managing mail - basically I have to log out after every column edited to get it to refresh.

Got one final thing to sort out - why when i select delete is it sending a copy of the mails into trash and the deleted folder?

more importantly how can I clear these - the button labelled purge logs me out (trash folder). I've deleted the files in the Deleted messages folder and these appear to be gone - I suspect when I go to trash its going to move them to the deleted messages folder therefore meaning I'll have deleted the same messages 4 times.

Re: Missing emails from one of my mailboxes

James30 — Thu, 18 May 2023 14:53:52 GMT

It's all out of sync basically, what you see at you end hasn't propagated in the background as webmail is after all just a web based IMAP client. When it's playing up like that it's best to try later on when it's less busy email wise.

Re: Missing emails from one of my mailboxes

poult — Sun, 21 May 2023 13:23:39 GMT

I'm having a similar problem. The Inbox folder on my Outlook client using IMAP has gone empty.

Other folders, like sent items, is synching fine, but after it takes about a minute saying it's synching the inbox, the result is an empty folder.

I can see through webmail that my folder is populated with emails and I have some unread, but webmail is hideous to use and I really need them in a proper client.

I have tried removing and recreating my profile in Outlook, but it as the same effect. I've tried setting up in Windows Mail, but the same again - an empty inbox and other folders are populated.

It looks as though a few people are having this problem. Please can you help?

Re: Missing emails from one of my mailboxes

Dinalt — Sun, 21 May 2023 14:25:09 GMT

Hi Poult,

Is this on a PC? If so check that you have sufficient space on your Hard Drive to expand the email file. My daughters laptop has a small SSD as the OS drive and I set it up so all her working files are on larger mechanical drive - if your email is set to save to a congested drive it wont successfully synch. If you are in this situationyou caneither reset the save location to a larger HD or copy the existing .ost file and then use a virtual link to it (this will save having to redownload all your emails again).

Good luck!

Re: Missing emails from one of my mailboxes

Townman — Thu, 25 May 2023 12:25:27 GMT

@Dinalt wrote:

Got one final thing to sort out - why when i select delete is it sending a copy of the mails into trash and the deleted folder?

more importantly how can I clear these - the button labelled purge logs me out (trash folder). I've deleted the files in the Deleted messages folder and these appear to be gone - I suspect when I go to trash its going to move them to the deleted messages folder therefore meaning I'll have deleted the same messages 4 times.

Because by default, that is the way ot is designed to work, to protect against the "Oh dear I did not mean to do that ... fat finger mouse click"!! There are though non-default options if you are happy to remove the safety

Culling mailbox contents

If you need to clean out your mailbox, may be because it is over quota, then as well as tidying up the inbox, you need to also look at the SENT ITEMS folder and then afterwards clear out the TRASH folder. However some times webmail performance can make this process very tedious, particularly if the delete action (actually a move to the trash folder) fails.

If you primarily want to delete emails, you can mitigate delete performance issues by doing an "immediate" delete (rather than a move to trash for deletion later) by holding down the SHIFT key when pressing the DEL key. This works in both webmail and most PC based email clients. WARNING SHIFT+DEL is not recoverable so be certain absolutely, that you do not need the email before pressing the buttons!

Alternatively, in webmail (Round Cube) Settings -> Server Settings there are some options worth exploring controlling how deletes are performed...

Flag the message for deletion instead of delete
If moving messages to "Deleted Items" fails, permanently delete them
Compact Inbox on logout

Setting these options and using them together will avoid the over heads of moving items to the trash folder when you wish to delete them. They will simply be greyed out and remain in the inbox list. After logging out of webmail, they will then be removed from the mailbox.

Whilst this might be highly proficient, it needs to be used with care, for when they are gone, they are gone. Note also that Plusnet house-keeping clears out the trash folder weekly.

net.

Re: Missing emails from one of my mailboxes

Townman — Thu, 25 May 2023 12:28:59 GMT

@poult wrote:

I'm having a similar problem. The Inbox folder on my Outlook client using IMAP has gone empty.

Other folders, like sent items, is synching fine, but after it takes about a minute saying it's synching the inbox, the result is an empty folder.

It is not overly helpful piggy-back posting on someone else's thread some about something entirely different.

The inbox not populating whilst the others do, points to incorrect server settings - you should try setting the "IMAP root folder" to inbox - then refresh the IMAP folders and the inbox should populate correctly.

This is an uncommon issue - not seen any similar posts on this one recently.