Thousands of emails deleted

[MrMe1]

Hi all - thousands of emails have been deleted from my btinternet.com account from both sub folders and the sent folder. Sent emails now only go back to 2020 whereas account has been in use since 2007, and multiply sub-folders where emails to be retained were placed are now empty. On a number of occasions emails placed in sub-folders were visible when sub-folders were opened, but literally disappeared as I watched within a second of the folder being opened. Some sub-folders still have emails in them, but many are now empty when opened (sub-folders that emails had definitely been saved in) - any emails remaining in sub-folders are 2020 or more recent.

BT have confirmed account has not been hacked - BT account is linked to outlook via IMAP with no settings to auto-archive or delete from email server when forwarded to outlook client - BT did recover some emails but most had been intentionally deleted (Junk/obsolete), with some previously saved in sub-folders reappearing in those sub-folders but immediately vanishing again when sub-folder opened - BT attempted second recovering and this only again recovered intentionally deleted emails but nothing reappeared in sub folders (even momentarily as with the first recovery).

Looks like tens of thousands of emails including business matters lost - any ideas anyone/anyone had similar experience?

[WSH]

If it’s important, why are you relying on third-party storage that you have no control over?

[Christopher_G]

Hi @MrMe1 

Welcome to the community.

Could you try checking your 'conversation view' settings and turn that off please? Just to see if that then populates the emails.

It should be under the 'view' tab.

Thanks

Chris 

[MrMe1]

Thanks WSF for you fantastically useful comment - enormously helpful.

[MrMe1]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your time and for you useful suggestion - have now tried this but to no avail.

MrMe

[Kimberlin]

I appreciate that you won't appreciate what I'm saying, but I completely agree with @WSH earlier comment. You'll have undoubtedly learned a harsh lesson from this if all of those emails have indeed been lost forever.

Needless to say, back up everything regularly and probably consider using a different email provider for business purposes. Not helpful to you I guess, but I wouldn't personally trust BT Mail to handle my mail considering the plethora of complaints on this very forum about BT Mail. But of course, as I'm so oft reminded by the loyal forumites, apparently, BT Mail problems only affect a minority of customers, i.e. the ones that complain via this forum.

I genuinely hope you can recover your email losses.

[gg30340]

Which version of Outlook are you using?

I do not use Outlook so I am unable to check but there is/was apparently a setting on versions of Outlook to deleted emails after a set time.

I have no idea whether it is still a feature but it may be possible that if your email account was set up as an IMAP account it may in turn have delete them from the BT servers.

See link which is an old link from 2023 but may still be relevant.

https://blogs.eyonic.com/why-older-emails-are-missing-in-outlook-and-how-to-get-them-back/