All emails have disappeared

[#1]

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@eltullah wrote:

Why do they keep going missing?

What did the ticket which you were referred to in post #12 advise you?

Which ISP are you with?  Plusnet itself or one of the legacy brands?

Emails are only archived for one of two reasons - file store usage exceeds the FUP or the mailbox has not been accessed for 6+ months.

If your mailbox is with the Plusnet brand, you will have had warning emails every week after your FUP exceeded 75% of the maximum.  That email will have been sent to the contact email address on your account.  Are you monitoring that mailbox?

Remember that after deleting items from the inbox, sent items and possibly other folders, you must also empty the trash folder to release the space.

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[#2]

Thanks for the advice. We were doing ok then received another 75% space used  warning. This time we knew what to do and both set about deleting emails but both of us are left in a mess.

Have any of our email folders been archived?

Juliet says that her Sent folder is now empty and she is sure she didn’t delete everything.

I seem to have deleted my entire Inbox from my iPad  and, it seems, from the webmail server ( I have also emptied the Trash). I didn’t do this intentionally but I could have hit Select All inadvertently — although I can still access those emails from my iPhone. I’m worried now that my phone will update itself in a way that loses everything. 

Can you please check whether you have any of our email archived. And is it possible to get the contents of my phone inbox back onto the server?

Many thanks,

Tim

[#3]

iPhones / iPads have an advanced setting one IMAP email accounts which empties the trash folder after a number of days. If you do not want that to happen you need to set it to off.

As for sent items - are they there if the mailbox is viewed via webmail? If yes, check which folder the iPhone has mapped to the sever ‘sent’ folder.

[#4]

Thanks. I’ve found Juliet’s missing sent emails. For some reason they are now in a folder on the server called Sent Messages. The Sent folder has only one recent message in it.

As for my own Inbox, I was aware of the need to clear the Trash folder in order to reduce the overall size of the email folder so I’ve been doing that manually. I can still see all of my inbox on my phone but not on the iPad or server. I’ve successfully mailed a couple of dozen emails back to myself from the phone and these show up in all three places. I don’t understand why my phone hasn’t synched with the server — although I’m relieved it hasn’t. Any thoughts on how I can save this from happening?

[#5]

Hi Tim

Is your iPhone setup to use our POP3 mail.plus.net incoming server or the IMAP server imap.plus.net?

Depending on the version of iOS the phone is running, to find out I’d go to Settings > Passwords and Accounts > select your Plusnet account then you should be able to see either IMAP or POP3.

If it’s POP3 which I suspect it may be, when your iPhone had collected the mail, it may have automatically removed the messages from the server downloading them to its local storage. 

Another possibility is that your iPad is set as IMAP sync’ing to the server and when you deleted mail from the iPad it’d have deleted the messages from the server but your iPhone set as POP3 still has them as it’s downloaded the messages to itself.

If I’m right, to get the messages on your iPhone back onto the server, I don’t think there’s an easy way. The easiest way is to forward yourself the messages one at a time although you’d need to deselect the option in your iPhone mail setting not to delete the mail from the server automatically otherwise you’ll get duplicate messages on your iPhone and nothing will remain on the server.

There’s another way, but it’s not straightforward - to use third party software to download the messages from the iPhone to a Mac if you have one, setup an IMAP email account on the Mac then put the messages into Mac Mail which should in theory move them to the server. 

There’s of course another possibility that we’ve archived your mail on the server but if your iPhone is using POP3 it’s retained them. I’d be happy to check that when I’m in the office tomorrow.

In summary, I’d first check on both your iPad and iPhone how they’re setup to collect mail, if they’re using POP3 or IMAP and we’ll go from there. 

[#6]

I wrestled a bit with my email settings recently because I was getting error messages. I eventually deleted and reinstalled the settings on the phone. I’ve checked both just now.

iPhone settings are headed POP ACCOUNT INFORMATION with the incoming server imap.plus.net and outgoing relay.plus.net

on my iPad the heading is IMAP ACCOUNT INFORMATION with the servers recorded identically

i hadn’t noticed this before. Does it explain the different behaviour? 

[#7]

I thought so although it’s a bit odd that the POP3 email account is working using imap.plus.net

Either way this seems to explain the behaviour. 

On your iPhone near the bottom of the page which says POP Account Information, if you tap on Advanced what’s ‘Delete from server’ set to?

[#8]

Delete from server — when removed from inbox

Thanks — That explains it but, as you say It is very odd 1. that these settings are working and 2. That it wasn’t apparent immediately I fiddled with the settings. I’m relieved that I’ve still got access to the inbox on my phone. Now I understand this seems to work rather well so I’m going to leave the settings as they are for now.

Thank you.

[#9]

I’ve just setup my own/test Plusnet mailbox on my iPhone X as POP3 using imap.plus.net and that’s worked, so it looks like the email protocol is determined by the account type not server. 

When you re-added the mail account to your iPhone using those current settings, I don’t think and I may be wrong that it backdates things i.e. only new messages will be removed from the server once the iPhone has downloaded them. 

So it’s possible all the historic messages were removed from the server when you deleted mail from your iPad, if you did ‘select all’.

Either way, moving forward I’d recommend setting up your emails on your iPhone as an IMAP email account, or select ‘Never’ for the ‘Delete from server’ option although with the latter, the iPhone will never be truly sync’d with the server and across other devices unless it’s IMAP. 

Before you set your emails up as IMAP on your iPhone, you've got the problem of moving the messages to the server so you don’t lose them. 

For the time being if you just prefer to leave things as they are, if you’ve not already I’d recommend keeping a backup of your iPhone to either iCloud or a laptop/computer so if anything happens to the phone you’ll be able to restore your messages that are stored locally from the backup. 

I hope this helps. 

[#10]

Thanks again.

I will take your advice. 

[#11]

No problem @Tim17 

Let me know if there's anything further you'd need help with.