E-mails gone

[Doug12]

I’m accessing mail via an Apple mail on phone and iMac client and connection is set up through IMAP

a few weeks ago, all my mails dissapeared then a few days later some came back but only from March 2021 i can still access access the account so wondering if there has been a server issue?

I’ve not deleted the e-mails as they have not been marked as deleted / moved to the trash.  Trying to understand what’s happed so you help appreciated. 

my mother has just told me all of hers have dissapeared also. We both have ntlworld accounts. 

Thanks, Doug 

[coenoby]

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@Doug12 wrote:

I’m accessing mail via an Apple mail on phone and iMac client and connection is set up through IMAP

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So have you checked your Ntlworld email account using Virgin Media's Webmail service on their website to see if the missing emails are still there?

Sign in from this link https://mail2.virginmedia.com/  with your Ntlworld email address and password. Check the Trash folder there as well as the Inbox.

There are always a steady trickle of posts on this forum where people report that some of their VM emails have gone missing but it is rarely possible to determine what happened.

A quick online search for "Emails gone missing" will show that it is not unique to VM email. From time to time, users of Gmail, Outlook.com, Yahoo and others report similar experiences. It emphasises the need to back up emails and not rely on email apps and webmail services to store emails.

Whenever there are IMAP clients involved suspicion always falls on them.  I know from personal experience it is all too easy to delete emails from your phone app without realising it.

Your experience of emails disappearing and then reappearing seems unusual, I remember someone experiencing that with MS Outlook and it was eventually tracked down a filter they had set up in Outlook. The emails were downloaded to  Outlook but just not being displayed. I am not familiar with Apple Mail but I see that it also has a filter option to temporarily display only certain messages.  It might be worth checking that.

Finally, you ask "wondering if there has been a server issue?"  I am not a VM employee so cannot give a definite answer. All I can say is that I have a number of Ntlworld email accounts and I have not seen any emails go missing from them.

Sorry I cannot give you a more definite answer.

Coenoby

[Paulina_Z]

Hi @Doug12,

Welcome to our Community Forums! Thank you for your first post and I'm very sorry to hear that both yours and your mother's emails have disappeared! I can completely understand how frustrating this can be.

Have you been able to see what @coenoby has suggested in his response? Are you able to check your NTLWorld using our webmail service on our website? Are your emails visible there?

I was able to look through our systems and there are no known issues that would be responsible for this problem. 

Please run some checks as suggested and come back to us with an update if you can.

Thank you.

[Doug12]

Thanks for response. I hadn’t thought of looking at VM web mail so signed in and it’s the same there.

It’s actually quite akward to do a bulk delete from the iPhone and even if I did accidentally delete over 15 ish years worths if e-mails, I’m sure I’d need to do the second step of removing them from trash too. 

I thought with IMAP, the record was always there in the server, just marked as deleted so not to display it.

Thanks for assistance  

• Cheers

Doug

[coenoby]

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@Doug12 wrote:

I thought with IMAP, the record was always there in the server, just marked as deleted so not to display it.

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That would be nice but IMAP merely keeps the email account on the app/client and the server in sync. So when you delete an email in one it also deletes it from the other.

You may be thinking of the POP3 protocol. If you use POP3 in your app/client that simply uploads emails from the Inbox on the server to the inbox on your app/client. The standard gives you the option whether to keep or delete the uploaded emails from the server. In fact VM have not implemented the POP3 standard in its entirety so if you use POP3 with a VM account VM always keep the email on the server, unless you manually delete it from webmail  of course.

Coenoby

[Zach_R]

Hi @Doug12,

Thank you for checking and confirming. If the emails in question are missing from the account via our webmail platform then I'm afraid it's likely they've been deleted and cannot be recovered. Is it possible that they've been deleted by accident from another device which has access to that email account?

Along with that, do you happen to know if there are any other devices with access to that email address where it's set up via POP3? As has been explained in this thread, that'll keep a local back up for you to retain the emails you wish to keep.

Thanks,