Mailbox problem - webmail and IMAP

[#1]

My wife is having trouble with her mailbox. She was previously accessing via Outlook 2016 IMAP settings and all was fine. Then, one day, she watched in horror as all her inbox emails disappeared before her eyes!

She went into Webmail and they were still on the server (phew!).

Since then we have had warnings about mailbox size which we have been trying to rectify by changing to POP3 settings so that it downloads her emails to her local PC and leave the last 30 days on the server. However we, again, received the mailbox size email.

Now, when she opens webmail we just get a server error when it tries to load the inbox (filter in webmail is set to to "all").

If she changes the filter to "flagged" it, mysteriously, shows 12 messages dating back to January 2019.

Please can her mailbox be checked to see if there are any corruption issues with it? We still cannot see any emails if connecting via IMAP and now Webmail doesn't work either.

Thanks,

Ian

Mailbox name = anne

[#2]

Hi Ian,

Using POP3 and IMAP together is not a good idea - generally it just causes confusion as you have described here.  If using Outlook 2016 it is far better to leave it as IMAP and use its auto-arching functionality to off-line emails or to archive them manually.

Web mail will now only see that is on the server.

Outlook can have a hissing fit with an IMAP configuration, where it local index of what it has been down loaded becomes confused so a complete refresh from the server is performed.

As for webmail performance, it is not filtering which is the issue but sorting ... though I suspect that filtering similarly will not help.

Slow webmail

There is a known gremlin in the third party Round Cube webmail program which can cause delays in listing emails - see the end user mitigation post at the top of the Email board here. It somewhat appears that any sorting or filtering on a large mailbox cripples the performance of RC webmail, where as the 'basic' webmail program (Squirrel Mail) is not affected. Using Squirrel Mail can be an effective way of accessing a mail box which is running slow with RC.

Remember when trying to reduce the size of a mailbox, check the sent folder and empty the trash folder.  Outlook has very proficient sorting tools - add SIZE to the column titles and sort on size - getting rid of those with big attachments (typically photos) is a swift approach to getting the over all size under control