Missing emails from one of my mailboxes

[#1]

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

[#2]

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

Regards

[#3]

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?

[#4]

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?

[#5]

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.

[#6]

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….

[#7]

@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"

[#8]

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

[#9]

@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?

[#10]

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?

[#11]

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

[#12]

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. 

[#13]

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. 

[#14]

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.

[#15]

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?