emails disappeared from plusnet webservers - solved - email client setting

[#1]

all my emails up to yesterday (Tuesday 18th June) at 23:50 have disappeared from the plus net servers.
Has anyone else experienced this?  
It looks like an accidental deletion to me.   Plus net telephone technical support refused to accept that this was not due to a client downloading and deleting them.  My clients are either set to leave messages on server, or to delete when I delete.  This was many years worth of emails, they would not have suddenly got deleted by a client which has not had its settings changed in years.

[#2]

How much storage was being taken up by the messages? Wondering if they've been removed because the account was over the 1GB email storage limit?
If that is the case there should have been emails warning of the excess when 600MB was exceeded; a copy of those should be in closed tickets in the Help Assistant.

[#3]

I can't see any tickets from us about this, so I'm relatively confident we haven't removed the messages. I'll pass the ticket on to our networks team to see if there's any possibility of restoring from a backup.

[#4]

Thank you spraxyt and Chris for your replies.
I have been using this account for 10 years or more so it is possible I exceeded the limit. Though as noted above no tickets have been raised to this effect. And in which case I'd have hoped that the oldest emails would be deleted first to bring me into line with the quota?  It is the wholesale deletion of everything that I find concerning.
@Chris, restoring the mails would be helpful but I would also like Plus Net to investigate and understand what has happened in order to be able to avoid future occurrences.
Regards
Nicola

[#5]

There's no automated script that would delete emails on our side. The archiving is manual so we can make sure that customers are contacted first. I don't like saying this, but it is far more likely to be an email client causing the issue that something our side.

[#6]

ok, I'll double check all my clients.  cheers

[#7]

Hi Chris,
Plus Net was right about it being an email client.  My Windows Live Mail client had mysteriously lost the "Leave a copy of messages on server" setting.  So I'll put that one down to Microsoft weirdness.  I don't need the messages to be restored so I'll close the question I opened.
Thank you for your response and efforts on my behalf
Nicola

[#8]

Glad you at least found out what the issue was (and thanks for sharing it back).
I always remember my MD storing all of his important messages and files in the Deleted Items and Recycle Bin to archive them ..... he wasn't too happy when I "cleaned up" his machine one day ......

[#9]

Nicola, it sounds like you should be using IMAP and not POP3.

[#10]

Quote from: picbits

I always remember my MD storing all of his important messages and files in the Deleted Items and Recycle Bin to archive them ..... he wasn't too happy when I "cleaned up" his machine one day ......

I had that with a lady in accounts storing stuff in the Deleted Items folder.....I had configured the server to clean out everyone's every Sunday.

[#11]

@Nicola
Glad to hear you found the cause of the problem.
Editing the thread title in the opening post to add "(solved)" could be helpful to others.

[#12]

@spraxyt
thanks for the tip