emails older then 5 days not displayed

[BenClackson]

My wife (the secondary email of my account) has a new problem: her Inbox is only showing the emails received in the last 5 days. But she has not deleted the emails received earlier. Each day the five day window advances so that she stops seeing another day's emails.

In her Settings | Filters, no filters are listed. Any other ideas what could explain this behaviour?

[用心棒]

Is this occurring in webmail or an email client?

In webmail try:

• selecting the folder where the missing email should be
• in the Search field enter 2021 and select 2021 as date from the suggestions offered
• does the returned search result contain the missing emails?

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[BenClackson]

Thanks for your reply. It was webmail of which I spoke, so I tried your recommendation, which I can see would clear any previous search term, but it didn't show up any new emails.

However we now realise that the emails displayed are not actually just the last 5 days, but all the days since the mailbox was last read by my wife's email client (Outlook), which was a week ago. This seems to be because in the Outlook settings for the account, the box "Leave a copy of messages on server" is not now ticked. It seems clear this is not a Virgin Media problem after all, so I apologise for my Post.

[ravenstar68]

I'm assuming the Outlook account is set up using POP3 - is this the case?

Tim

[BenClackson]

Yes - POP3

[ravenstar68 · Accepted solution]

The reason I asked this is because on VM's system currently, when a POP3 client "deletes" a mail, it's not actually deleted.  It's just hidden from all future POP3 transactions by adding a special flag..  The mail is normally still visible to IMAP clients, which includes the webmail platform itself.

Tim

[BenClackson]

Thank you very much: I didn't know that and it enables me to improve the configuration of the Outlook email client.

Ben

[ravenstar68]

The recommendation is, that if you are using viewing the same account on multiple devices, you switch from POP3 to IMAP anyway.

Tim

[用心棒]

Given the missing emails could not have been deleted from the server by your wife or Outlook, and that no other explanation can be found, do consider following the (precautionary) advice here https://www.virginmedia.com/help/virgin-media-account-has-been-hacked

BTW in webmail did you check the Trash folder for the missing emails?