Found some missing emails on Greenby Webmail!

[#1]

One son's Force9 account was migrated on Monday 1st - the first he knew about it was the Welcome to Greenby email! None of his Apple devices would connect, so resorted to Webmail. There, the last email shown at the top was the Welcome to Greenby message - none after that. I suspect others have seen this problem on several thrteads. 

Looking at webmail, I clicked Options, and saw a Sort Column setting which was None, which did not seem right. Changed it to Date Received (+ descending, list) and lots of later messages appeared at the top of the list!

So, the messages were there all the time, just somewhere else in the list, and they have not been lost.

I hope this is a help to others.

Webmail uses the IMAP servers, next job is to investigate device connection problems, and when resolved all should be well.

[#2]

Tada! Awesome! That has revealed the 48 hours of mostly missing emails I was seeing.

It makes sense once you know you are viewing them unsorted just in the order they are in the store, as there will have been a cross over where new mails where arriving in the Greenby box, whilst the existing emails where then being sent across to the date/time stamps could easily be out of sync form the two sources by many hours.

This needs more visibility, so that everyone knows about this!!

[#3]

Yes, there has been a messsage on the Plusnet email login webpage for some time saying:

"We have temporarily disabled the sort function, there is no need to contact us."

https://webmail.plus.net/

I also understand from reports that the Greenby webmail version, by default, clears the Deleted mailbox on exit; unlike the current Plusnet version. This is something that needs to be highlighted, IMO.

[#4]

@pvmb As I discovered a while back, since the webmail server is now on the Greenby server - for all accounts, the default action on exiting webmail clears all deleted items on exit. 

[#5]

I never use webmail normally, but I suppose if Plusnet webmail disabled sorting by setting something to None, and that was migrated across, it might explain the Greenby setting. Though I can find no setting of that in the Plusnet webmail, but they might have removed it totally. The other possibility is that the Greenby initial default is None - which seems silly.

If Greenby does clear a Deleted Mailbox (or do you mean folder?) that seems wrong to me. However, in Settings => Preferences => Server settings there is a Delete Trash on Logout option. I suspect Trash is a nasty left-pondian translation of Deleted, but I am not sure!

[#6]

@mavison If that was in response to my comment, I discovered it a while back - think I may have made a comment on here at the time. I too don't use webmail by default, but was experimenting at the time as I was seeing a mountain of Google Group generated spam. 

On checking, I found that the deleted items folder action was changed (at that time, it may have been reverted) to 'empty on exit' from the PN default of manual clearance. I checked (via @Townman ) if I was seeing things, and he confirmed that the default action had been changed when the webmail server was switched to Greenby (for everyone).

[#7]

Webmail sorting plays havoc with the IMAP service performance.  Therefore it has been sent to the default of received date descending (aka none).

That gives optimal performance for all during the migration activity ... which is resource intensive.

[#8]

---

@Townman wrote:

Webmail sorting plays havoc with the IMAP service performance.  Therefore it has been sent to the default of received date descending (aka none).

That gives optimal performance for all during the migration activity ... which is resource intensive.

---

Sorry, but my observations on three mailboxes, and at least one other user (@emardee in post 2 above) is that the most recent recent emails after migration were NOT visible at the top of the list until the instant None was changed to Date Received (descending).

Unless all emails are always retrieved by the IMAP server in reverse date received order, they will not be in that sequence.

[#9]

In many cases, the difference between sorted by date, and unsorted, will be very little, as the emails will normally be stored in the order they were received into the email store... so roughly date order already. Of course, there are exceptions to this, and the migration is one key time from the look of my inbox!! I don't know how the migration worked behind the scenes, but it might be that the new emails came into a blank inbox at the point of switching, and the old emails got brought over after that (Or something else with a similar end effect of storing them in chunks out of order). The emails were definitely out of order for me.. and I worried some were missing. Sorting, sorted that!  Baddum-tish!

I was using the Greenby Webmail, which does let you sort the view, but it defaults to none (which won't be an issue unless you have emails out of order in the list, which might depend on how quick you migrated, and how much email you get etc). It was a major issue for me though! Hopefully the Greenby servers won't get clogged by the sorting. I think from memory there was a particular issue with the old version of webmail that Plusnet were using, but they couldn't update due to a customisation or something maybe?? Anyway, I think a modern webmail on a modern server shouldn't have too many issues sorting when needed. And hopefully will have minimal impact on the migration side of things, which I would suspect is mostly slowed down by the Plusnet end of the servers...

[#10]

---

@Townman wrote:

Webmail sorting plays havoc with the IMAP service performance.  Therefore it has been sent to the default of received date descending (aka none).

---

Now my own account has been migrated, I now have positive proof before my eyes that a sort of Descending Date Descending is not the same as None.in Greenby webmail.

I can see on the list of emails successive dates of 2023-11-29 23:21 then Today 13:13.

Post-migration emails are themselves in descending date, and the bulk of the migrated emails are in desceding date/. However, post-migration emails received before and during migration can be interspersed with the migrated emails.  Indeed I found one part of my list which was alternating Today (new) and Tuesday (old)!

I suggest that with None the displayed sequence is the order which they were added to the store, which during and after the migrations is not the date the email was actually received. Therefore a sort default of None can effectively hide messages because they are totally out of sequence, but a sort on Arrival Date displays as expected, and sorting a list of even a few thousand pointers should not cause performance.problems these days, particularly as most will be in the correct sequence already.

[#11]

@mavison 

Pedantically speaking you are correct; the sort order is mail item storage file date timestamp.  In the normal order of things, that would be received date.

@dave 

Can anything be done to impede the reception of new emails into the new service during the migration window so that all existing emails are transferred and get a file time stamp which is earlier that any new email?

Can the migration process be configured to keep the original file timestamps?

[#12]

---

@jab1 wrote:

@pvmb As I discovered a while back, since the webmail server is now on the Greenby server - for all accounts, the default action on exiting webmail clears all deleted items on exit. 

---

But that is not the case - if you have yet to be transferred to the Greenby email account.

[#13]

@pvmb 

That is quite incorrect.

The webmail IMAP client by default now empties the trash folder on exit.  This is a client level configuration item, nothing to do with which side of the divide the mailbox is in.

[#14]

"The webmail IMAP client by default now empties the trash folder on exit"

This is confusing. I use the webmail client and nothing has changed wrt deleting emails on exit - it behaves as it always has AFAIK. So, unless I changed the default in the past...

If so, would this setting be the same after transfer to Greenby? The impression I got on here was that the change to Greenby would alter the system's behaviour.

[#15]

The webmail service / client changed to Greenby many weeks ago.  It behaves the same as any other IMAP client; it connects to the IMAP server proxy which determines which service to connect to depending on where YOUR mail is.  Thereby the characteristics of the webmail client are agnostic about where the mail is.

This is a configuration item in webmail’s “server” settings.