A Plusnet CS person has told me this:
"Unfortunately it would not be possible to restore these emails as our backups have since cycled out as we do not have the capacity to store all our customer's emails as backups for more than a few days."
This was in response to Plusnet deleting my entire account by mistake - broadband access, all account info, all mailboxes, everything, then taking a very long time to restore only my account plus re-creating some mailboxes but no backed up emails. Then after 10 days I received the reply you see above.
I am completely shocked by this. Only a few days of backup and the excuse is they have no space. This is a leading internet service company with about 1 million customers? Well buy some more space then, it is not expensive. Rent some offline storage from a 3rd party in case of an in-house failure or cockup like when you lost 700GB of customer emails recently. Plusnet must absolutely not provide just a few days of rolling backups. There should be a longer term archive taken so there are no gaps. Given that it has taken 10 days for me to be told they cannot restore my emails because they have gone, Plusnet's system is not fit for purpose.
I am slightly fortunate in that I am using IMAP on 3 different PCs. Two use Outlook and my bad luck was that by default Outlook only downloads headers. However for the third I used Thunderbird and the default seems to be download everything. I have now made two duplicates and will attempt a restore soon. My wife was not so lucky as I was only using Outlook for hers.
So my advice is:
1. Plusnet sort out your backups and implement something that stores emails for longer than your customer service response times IMMEDIATELY
2. Anyone reading this, do not rely on Plusnet for backups. Use an email client and set it to download all messages
3. Make your own backups (of course)
4. Or don't use Plusnet email - I do because they host a domain for me and it works better than Gmail in that respect (none of the "sent on behalf of" stuff in the header)
