Years of emails deleted / disappeared

[gascar]

All of my received and sent emails - about 20GB,  have disappeared - everything before a couple of days ago.

I've tried the reorder-by suggestions, nothing. I use the webmail service on the virgin website - no agent.

I'm a teacher - I often have to go back to find things people sent me some time ago, or I sent out, so it's pretty devastating.

From what I read there are no backups kept at VM. That's appallingly incompetent if true

I only stay with Virgin because of the emil addresses I've been using for 20 or whatever years.

The only thing I can image nay have happened is reaching the 25GB limit, but I don't think so - the number goes up very slowly.  I suppose I CAN believe that Virgin would delete the lot without notice - is it true?

Does anyone have any suggestion on how to get them back?

Obviously an email provider which loses all your emails, is not fit for purpose and has to be ditched.

[jem101]

Although I certainly sympathise with the situation you are in, I must point out that NONE of the free email providers (gmail, outlook etc.) backup the mailboxes, that’s your job if the information in said mailbox is important to you. 

Unfortunately if the email is not there in the webmail view, then it’s all gone, permanently and there simply is no way to get it back!

[coenoby]

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@gascar wrote:

The only thing I can image nay have happened is reaching the 25GB limit, but I don't think so - the number goes up very slowly.  I suppose I CAN believe that Virgin would delete the lot without notice - is it true?

That's not my understanding.  From what has been reported here it would seem that if a VM mailbox reaches its limit VM do not delete emails to make room. What they do instead is to reject all new incoming emails to that mail account until the customer / account holder creates more space by deleting emails from their mailbox.

Obviously an email provider which loses all your emails, is not fit for purpose and has to be ditched.

That is absolutely true but to be fair VM's free email service was always just a basic, no frills service provided as part of their broadband contract.  You may not be aware but VM no longer offers free email accounts to new broadband customers or allows existing customers to create new email accounts.

Clearly they do not see the provision of a state of the art email service as a part of their business model going forward and I can understand that.

Despite what people might think, providing and supporting an email service is a costly exercise. There are currently a raft of excellent free email services that are supported either by paid for business versions (such as Gmail and Outlook) or by adverts (such as Yahoo or AOL). VM will always struggle to compete with those big players so it is understandable that they have decided to move on.

Here's a few options to consider https://www.lifewire.com/best-free-email-accounts 

Coenoby

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