Emails gone from web mail inbox

[thefrasers]

I rarely use webmail as I prefer to use a local client such as Thunderbird. However, if I'm away from my PC I do like to be able to access emails through the web. However, last time I looked a whole bunch of emails had disappeared from my inbox. Not the most recent ones, but I had lost everything between 15th August and 17th July (see below).
 
They don't seem to be in junk or trash, although some of them seem to be in the Spam folder for some reason.

I have no idea why. I know that my inbox is very full - which might be a problemn - but I thought the whole point of having IMAP was to keep them on the server. If I do need to delete emails, No one has told meno-one has told me. And anyway, surely I ought to have to delete old ones before more recent ones? As long as I use local clients it is not a problem, but I am having to work more away from home at the moment and would like to be able to rely on my webmail.

 

What do I do?

[用心棒]

The mechanism for handling a full mailbox does not involve deletion of existing emails; instead sender is notified their message could not be delivered and user receives an email advising them their mailbox is full.

How much storage is available? Sign into webmail on a desktop or laptop and check Mail quota, highlighted below:

Were the missing email in webmail shown in Thunderbird?

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[coenoby · Accepted solution]

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@thefrasers wrote: 

They don't seem to be in junk or trash, although some of them seem to be in the Spam folder for some reason.

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I cannot explain that but I can clarify a couple of things:

"I know that my inbox is very full - which might be a problem"-

It should not be. If your VM mailbox gets filled up, VM stop the mailbox from receiving new emails and just rejects them back to the sender. VM don't delete emails from your mailbox to make room for new ones.  If the mailbox does stop receiving new emails because it's full then you have to delete emails to make space for new ones.

"I thought the whole point of having IMAP was to keep them on the server."

Yes..............but!            What IMAP also does is to keep the mailbox on the client, in this case Thunderbird, in sync with the mailbox on the server.

So if you delete an email from the inbox in Thunderbird it will be deleted from the server as well. It works the other way too, so that if you delete an email from webmail it will be deleted from Thunderbird.

Are the emails that have gone missing in webmail still visible in Thunderbird?

Coenoby

[thefrasers]

Thanks for the additional detail. I always get confused as regards how synchronisation works between servers, webmail, and local clients, as it seems as though they interact in different ways on different days! However, even if removing a message in Thunderbird removed it from webmail, I don't understand why there is this huge gap that occurs at the end of 15th August. The same gap does not appear anywhere else in the inbox, and I do not recall doing anything particularly different.

Though I was suspicious, it obviously isn't the case that my mailbox is used up since I am definitely well inside my quota.

As I say, all of the mail that I wanted to keep locally is on the TB server. I'm just nervous that one day I'm going to want to find an old email and it won't be accessible on the web. Furthermore, I don't see why this couldn't happen again.

[coenoby]

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@thefrasers wrote:

Furthermore, I don't see why this couldn't happen again.

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The thing is that you can never be sure that your emails will always be available on the server and VM do not keep backups. You really need to back up VM emails yourself to ensure you always have a copy of your emails.

1) You can create export files from your VM Webmail account:

• open the webmail folder you want to export
• select the emails you want to export
• or to select all emails in the fiolder, select the first email and then scroll down to the last email in the folder, press Ctrl + shift  and press enter. That will select all emails in the folder.
• click on the "more actions" icon, the three red horizontal bars just above the list of emails.
• click on the "Save as file" option

You will then find the export file in your Downloads folder. That will contain copies of every email that you selected and if you click on them they will open in Thunderbird. Save those files, on a USB stick for example. Just to be clear, the original emails will still remain in your webmail account.

2) Alternatively you can do a similar process from Thunderbird:

• Launch Thunderbird.
• Select your Inbox or another folder you wish to export.
• Select the email you want to export. Or press CTRL+A to select all emails.
• Click the menu button to display the Thunderbird menu.
• Select Save as > File.
• Select the folder where the emails should be saved and click Save.

That means you will have those copies to go back to if the emails disappear from Thunderbird and Webmail.

Also, Mozilla do offer an add on to Thunderbird https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/importexporttools-ng/  which integrates with Thunderbird. It allows you to export and import emails from and into Thunderbird. I have never tried that but you could take a look at it to see if it would suit your needs.

Coenoby