Emails missing from server

[Sharonsb21]

Hi, Been with virgin for years and found out 2 days ago emails are missing from server everything prior to 31st Jan 22. How can that be? My partners account totally normal.  Account is still valid for access and receiving emails as normal, all trash,sent and spam folders are empty!  Spoke to customer service who just kept saying sorry and it was probably a storage issue. If they were talking about the 25gb allocated, i have never been anywhere near capacity.

   I have not made any deletions, so where have they gone? I also thought it was impossible for an email provider to delete anything, but could be wrong. Could anybody shed some light on this please. Really frustrated.

 .

[用心棒 · Accepted solution]

It is impossible to say with certainty what caused the sudden loss of emails. Some possible causes are:

• compromised email account
• unexpected IMAP email client
• software update
• ⋮

Whilst email providers certainly have the capability to micromanage mailboxes there are likely legal and operational reasons that mean they do not, i.e. they would not be deleting delivered emails.

Regrettable if the missing emails cannot be found within your mailbox then they are considered unrecoverable.

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[Sharonsb21]

Hi, I suspected this would be the outcome, but thanks very much for replying.

[Carley_S]

Hi @Sharonsb21

Welcome to the community!
Sorry to hear you're having issues with your email at this time. It's certainly an odd issue. 

Can you confirm if the same happens on both a client (i.e. outlook) and webmail or does it just happen on one and not the other? 

[Sharonsb21]

Hi Carley,  yes, it happens on both. Using Thunderbird for years and yes had a backup profile but i lost the information because of a pc crash. Reinstalled Client, and this was how i found out when logging into webmail that all previous had just gone. Just my luck.

[Beth_G]

Hi Sharonsb21,

Oh right I see, so you noticed that the emails had gone after the PC crashed? If that is the case, then that does definitely sound like the cause. However sadly, as 用心棒 has advised, if you are unable to find the missing emails, either somewhere in your mail box or in a 'deleted emails' folder, they would be irretrievable. I'm really sorry.