Vanishing emails

[#1]

Yesterday as I checked my emails with Outlook 2016 client on Windows 10, all my messages vanished from the screen. I now find that all messages from Inbox, Sent, Drafts etc have gone from Outlook and also on the webmail. I have not had any warnings from Plusnet so can you investigate and hopefully restore them for me.

Even new messages which have come in since have now vanished in to the Twilight Zone

[#2]

@cbutlercole  how odd  I presume it's your own personal email account and it's an Microsoft client account?

If so, it should all be there when you sign in to Outlook or Hotmail, etc.

If it's a third-party administered Outlook email account, (like your workplace) then you need to contact them, and check  permissions.

[#3]

Email archiving

Plusnet has two email content archiving 'events'

1. Exceeding the Fair Usage Policy (FUP): This is invoked when the sum of the contents of all of your email boxes exceeds the 1GB FUP allowance. Users will have received warning notices for several weeks, having exceeded 75% of the FUP. After 2 warnings of having exceeded 100% of the FUP, mailboxes are archived to bring the FUP utilisation down below 100%. The act of archiving emails is recorded in the user's ticket history - see the PN tickets link below - notification emails are sent to the contact email address, as specified by the user, under their contact preferences in the account details - it is imperative that this email address is monitored
2. Mailbox not accessed for a while: After a period of not accessing a mailbox (it not being logged into) the contents are archived. An email is sent to that mailbox advising of the archiving action, after it has been archived. No record of the action is recorded in the ticket history

Archives are retained for 30 days. When making a request to unarchive emails, it is very helpful to inform staff which of the above archives appears to have been performed - it stops them looking for non-existent tickets!

Plusnet account holders can try to raise a ticket here.  If that does not work, please post back here.

[#4]

Hi @cbutlercole 

I set the email address in my account to my Hotmail address. That means that I get every email from Plusnet in both the Plusnet and the Hotmail account. The advantage of Hotmail is that the limit to the inbox is quite a few GB.

Dave

[#5]

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@cbutlercole wrote:

Even new messages which have come in since have now vanished in to the Twilight Zone

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I rather missed the throw-a-way comment on the end of your post.

Rather than this being a matter of Plusnet archiving your emails, this might be a matter of you having multiple email clients looking at the mailbox, one being configured as POP3 without "leave on server" being selected.

There is a further, more sinister possibility that your email account has been compromised and someone is stealing your emails.  You might care to change the password on the mailbox to be sure.

@JW would it be possible to identify the IP address sources which have accessed this mailbox to see if there is any credence to the idea that the mailbox has been compromised please?

[#6]

It is a Plusnet email account which is accessed using Outlook 2016 client via IMAP settings. No warnings about archiving - everything has just vanished.

[#7]

Thanks to the information from Townman, I was able to access my tickets and discover that the mailbox has been archived due to being full. Unfortunately I still had an old email address registered as the contact one so did not get any of the warnings (odd that they cannot send them to the email address which has the problem?)

Now I just need to find a way to get Plusnet to un-archive the messages which does not involve hanging on the phone for ages as the online chat system is not operational at present. Anybody know a way to get that done?

[#8]

Evening @cbultercole I've raised a task for your emails to be unarchived. You'll get confirmation from me via the Member Centre shortly.

[#9]

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@cbutlercole wrote:

Unfortunately I still had an old email address registered as the contact one so did not get any of the warnings

Now I just need to find a way to get Plusnet to un-archive the messages ... Anybody know a way to get that done?

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Indeed it us to the user to maintain an active email address (and monitor it) for the purposes of receiving service updates.  The action of archiving email accounts is performed at an account level, not a mailbox level, therefore such warnings are sent to the service notification email address registered on the account.

Advice on how to request a restore is contained in post #3 ... however @tinytaco has caught your requested and queued the restore manually.