Historically, the VM T’s and C’s which you signed up to, explicitly or implicitly, have always said this or similar -
Email use
6.5. It is your responsibility to back up the contents of your email account.
There are numerous examples on this site of “lost emails” - usually caused by a failure of the user to understand how easy it is to “accidentally” delete lots of emails by hitting the wrong buttons on their smartphone or tablet for instance – or failing to understand the downside consequences of managing emails via multiple devices.
No major (free) email provider will guarantee to recover lost or deleted individual email data. In a recovery situation their focus is to be able to recover the service following any major failure, from the system backups. The policy of various email providers about individual email data recovery varies from - “if it’s not in Trash it’s gone” - to “we will also look in some of our backup disc storage which we recycle every 7 days approx”.
Some popular services - for example - say this -
Gmail - “When you delete a message, it stays in your Trash for 30 days. After that time, it will be permanently deleted from your account and can't be recovered.”
Yahoo - “If any of your emails have been deleted or gone missing in the last 7 days, you can submit a restore request and we’ll do everything we can to try to recover your lost messages.”
Microsoft Outlook.com - “When you accidentally delete an email message from your Outlook on the web email, you can recover those items if they're still in your Deleted Items folder, and in some cases, you can even recover items after the Deleted Items folder is emptied.”
VM’s policy is similar to Gmail – but the Trash is (allegedly) emptied after 7 days, not 30.
Please choose any new supplier carefully.
