All email gone

[#1]

I’ve had a reply from the help team on the archived mail thread saying they can’t see any evidence of it being archived but they can see that it’s all gone.  It’s been raised with the mail team. 

[#2]

Latest update is that they have not been archived but they are still investigating why they have disappeared.  The only folder which didn’t get emptied is Sent items. 

[#3]

Oh Dear!!

What folders were there other than sent items?

If only the inbox, then one should consider the possibility of a rouge POP3 email client having emptied the mailbox.  In short, is there a possibility that your mail account has been hacked?

POP3 clients only look at the inbox folder and by default, they remove the content of the folder after downloading the emails.

Try sending yourself an email watch for it appearing using webmail.  If it then disappears, suspect that there is a POP3 client somewhere.  If you have not set up the dame, change your password immediately.

If you have used the same email address and password combination elsewhere (Amazon, Netflix, etc) then change the passwords there as well.

[#4]

Thanks for your further thoughts @Townman.

I have various folders for categorising emails, both in my main <username> account and the catchall+<username> account.  On both accounts all folders except Sent ended up empty.  If it were a POP3 client which downloaded all the mails then (a) it would have to have been set up to access both email accounts, and (b) I would have thought that a POP3 client would have emptied Sent as well?  My PN password is unique to those accounts, not used anywhere else.  Since the event mails have been accumulating in both accounts, nothing has disappeared since so it was a one-off event (so far!).  I’ve tried Googling to see if any other Thunderbird users have had a similar experience but not come up with anything.  

[#5]

For sure, POP3 does not touch the sent folder. Least not when I last tested it.

[#6]

After digging around a bit it seems that POP3 only accesses the Inbox on the server - if that is the case then a POP3 client wouldn’t have been able to empty all my other folders.

[#7]

Well I'm getting no joy at all from support.  A Support Question was created, and for a while I could read messages in it (mostly saying that the date for it to be looked at was being bumped on by a day or two every day or two) and respond. Now I cannot respond to it.  The last message on it was three days ago and looked like this:

---------------------------

Dear Mr Bees,

Kind regards,
<Redacted>

---------------------------

That was it - no content other than "Dear" and "Regards".  I'm only posting this on here because I'm out of ideas.  My email hasn't been restored and support seem to have given up on me without telling me (or telling me why).  What's the process for escalating?

Moderator's note:
Personal information removed from a public forum (to an area that staff can see).

[#8]

Raise a complaint , the link to the 'complaints code of practice' is on the bottom of every forum page

https://www.plus.net/help/legal/complaints-code-of-practice/?_ga=2.58005410.985133573.1707486812-454...

You can do it by raising a complaint ticket from the member centre ( a complaint is about the only type of ticket that a user can create now...)

[#9]

Sad to hear this and even more sad to hear that I am not the only one this has happened to as plusnet has also 'archived' all my emails in January and is unable to restore them (apparently have no backup copies !!!!) so heaven knows what happens if they have a cyber attack 

So firstly anyone who has plusnet email via IMAP Id suggest you BACKUP NOW as it doesnt appear that they keep long term backups of amil content 

re 

I have been in contact with our back-end team to double check the back up servers and it has been confirmed that we have only got upto 21/01/2024 as the last back up. As the emails were archived on 11/01/2024, this means anything prior to 11/01/2024 no longer exists. Please accept my sincerest apologies for this.

I have passed on my case to the ombudsman but they have very little power to force plusnet to do anything

[#10]

@MikeBz - I'm sorry to hear about what's gone on and I would hate to think that we have missed something when we could have helped so if you want to DM us your username so we can look, that would be great

[#11]

Thanks @James30 , I've sent you a DM.

[#12]

@bar8s in my case the emails weren't even archived, I wasn't near the quota, they just disappeared.

[#13]

@MikeBz - Ahh I see, email just vanishing is quite common, not due to mistakes but because of POP3, in it's design if you setup our email using the mail.plus.net instead of imap.plus.net server that will clear out all emails and are managed on the PC from then on and because we don't have a very flashy mail platform we can't reverse that. Even turning on a old PC that had pop3 setup will wipe the server. Do any of those things sound possible for your circumstances?

@bar8s - Feel free to PM us your username too thanks. Thanks

[#14]

@James30 No I only use IMAP, haven't used POP3 for decades.  The only email clients I use are Thunderbird on Win10 (which has never been configured for POP3) and the Apple mail apps on iPhone/iPad.

[#15]

@MikeBz  Have you logged into the webmail directly to see if your emails are there?

This will tell us if they have disappeared from the server or just the client site you're using.