This topic

Lost emails

gatehill — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 10:40:44 GMT

I recently bought a new PC and have been in the process of transferring all my emails from my old one. I used Windows Live Mail set up as a POP3 account with emails being deleted from the BT server after 3 days. I am using Outlook 365 on my new PC and have set this up with IMAP. I had not appreciated that the emails were therefore held on the BT server only, as a result of which I have lost all my emails over 3 days old. Some 50 relatively important emails were lost.

Does anyone know if BT are able to recover these? If so, I will contact them.

Thanks, Stephen

Re: Lost emails

licquorice — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 11:43:53 GMT

Not sure why you have lost your emails because of using IMAP, they will still be on the server unless you have deleted them.

Re: Lost emails

gatehill — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 12:13:30 GMT

Thanks for your reply; the emails were lost because when I was using the WLM account and POP3, the server was set to delete them after 3 days. They were always downloaded to my (old) PB.

Re: Lost emails

gg30340 — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 12:18:38 GMT

Did you check in your Trash/deleted folder?

If they are not there and if you have deleted them from your device that was using the IMAP account they will have been deleted from the BT server and will not be recoverable.

For future information, an IMAP account synchronises instantly with the BTMail servers. ie delete an email on the IMAP account and it is deleted instantly on the BTMail servers/ webmail and vice versa.

Re: Lost emails

licquorice — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 12:30:02 GMT

@gatehill wrote:

Thanks for your reply; the emails were lost because when I was using the WLM account and POP3, the server was set to delete them after 3 days. They were always downloaded to my (old) PB.

But that was with WLM, when you moved to Outlook 365 and IMAP those settings wouldn't have carried over unless you configured Outlook 365 to delete the mails from the server.

Emails prior to your change will be on your old PC, subsequent emails will still be on the BT server.

Re: Lost emails

gatehill — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 14:46:01 GMT

"But that was with WLM, when you moved to Outlook 365 and IMAP those settings wouldn't have carried over unless you configured Outlook 365 to delete the mails from the server."

True, but I moved most of my Inbox over to 365 but as the BT server was set to delete after 3 days, I lost them.

Currently I have not set anything to delete automatically after a certain period. I'm noy sure where to do that with the IMAP settings. Any thoughts?

Re: Lost emails

gatehill — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 14:48:52 GMT

Thanks for replying.

All trash etc folders checked. I even ran ScanPST but no errors found. So I guess there is no point in contacting BT if you think they are gone forever....

Re: Lost emails

gg30340 — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 14:57:02 GMT

If you still had WLM set up and working when you moved all your emails into Outlook, they would have been placed back onto the server but if your WLM POP account was still active it would have sent the message to delete after 3 days to the BTMail servers and the emails would then have been deleted after three days.

You should have removed the WLM message to delete after 3 days before moving the emails over and then removed the email account from WLM or at the very least stopped it from accessing the account to look for email.

EDIT: If they are not on BTMail webmail it means they are not on the servers and they are gone. BT can not/ will not try and recover them for you.

Re: Lost emails

gg30340 — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 15:01:15 GMT

Have you checked to see if your WLM PST folder is still on your PC. They are normally located in C:\Users\<userlogin>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail, but you can move the default location.

Re: Lost emails

licquorice — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 15:09:43 GMT

If WLM was still active when you configured Outlook 365, it would still be downloading the emails in parallel with Outlook. You can operate 2 clients simultaneously, one POP3 and one IMAP. The POP3 client will still download the mails and then delete them from the server. The IMAP client will only show mails that haven't been deleted.

As @gg30340 has suggested, check they are not on your other machine.

Re: Lost emails

gatehill — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 18:41:09 GMT

I have found the folder as per your navigation, It contains some 25 emails from 2016 to 2022 and all the very recent ones. None of the ones I was hoping to find, however.

Whilst I consider myself reasonably computer literate I has never used IMAP before so didn't understand all its subtleties! I can't seem to find a way of automatically deleting emails in the inbox after x days, only archiving them and hence removing them from the server.

One further question: I have set up quite a few storage folders in Outlook. Am I correct in assuming that these will not be reflected automatically in the BT server? I don't think they are - and hope not.

Thanks for all your help

Re: Lost emails

licquorice — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 18:47:53 GMT

You can decide which folders are synced with the server.

Re: Lost emails

gg30340 — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 19:55:52 GMT

Did you check on your "old" PC for the POP3 folders?

I don't use Outlook so I could be wrong but as far as I am aware the email folders you have set up in Outlook IMAP will synchronise with the BT servers by default.

As regards deleting the emails after a certain time you could set up a rule to do this. To save having to talk you through how to do that, have a look at this link to see if it would meet your needs.

https://superuser.com/questions/549565/deleting-emails-from-a-sender-after-x-days

Keep in mind unless you do as suggested by @licquorice all your folders will be on and synchronised with the BT server unless you select not to synchronise with the server.

It appears to me that you may be causing problems/stress/issues or what ever for yourself by using IMAP which is primarily for people using their email on more than one device and requiring each device to reflect the same as the other ones. ie send/receive/delete, folders and contents on one is shown as the same on the other devices.

If you do not need or want that facility you would be better to forget about using IMAP and go back to using a POP3 account.

Re: Lost emails

licquorice — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 21:12:41 GMT

I still can't see how the mails got deleted in the transition.

There's no setting to delete mails from the server within IMAP except deleting the mails by selecting and deleting, and if the mails were collected via POP3 they would still be on the PC with WLM.

How were you actually transferring the emails from the old PC?

Re: Lost emails

gatehill — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 13:39:44 GMT

Dear licquorice and GG

Thanks for all your replies. I think I'm sorted now. Emails that were lost are gone and I am accepting that. To transfer all my stored emails I had set up a separate IMAP address in WLM and created folders into which I moved my old emails and they then appeared on the new PC as I set up that same account in Outlook 365.

With the help from google I am solving most of my learning issues in 365. One minor niggle is that I found the way to show the number of emails in any folder with a number on the left side of the status bar at the bottom, but that count is not appearing for all folders! Any thoughts would be appreciated!

Once again, thanks for all the assistace you have both provided.