Lost emails

[gatehill]

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 

[licquorice]

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

[gatehill]

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.

[gg30340]

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. 

[licquorice]

---

@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.

[gatehill]

"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?

[gatehill]

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....

[gg30340]

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.

[gg30340]

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.

[licquorice]

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.