Lost Emails

[tearinghair]

I was fiddling about with my tablet yesterday, trying to free up some space. Deleted all emails. Fair enough, that was intentional; but in the past they have remained on my PC. This time they have disappeared from there too. I know the two are synchronised, but this has never happened before. It's not a huge problem;there was only one marked unread, which I was intending to print before deleting, but there are a couple of attachments I'd like to have kept. Is there any way of retrieving them? I think everything is on back-up, but I don't know how to access that. Or would a restore work?

[murraymints]

have you checked in recycle file

[tearinghair]

Yes, nothing there - I'd deleted that too! Running Windows 7, by the way.

[murraymints]

chris is the man for this one..he'll be round later..if I see him I will point this out

[Prudie]

Agree with Minty - but expect he will ask first how you get your emails (web based, gmail, a client like MS Outlook etc etc or what)

[tearinghair]

isp is BT.

[murraymints]

you sound just like him Prud ! lol xx

[murraymints]

what's your e mail ? I mean how do you get it ? i use gmail...

[Buenchico]

>>> chris is the man for this one

Er, possibly not!

We've not been told which email provider TH uses. (BT? Gmail? GMX? Another service?). If it's BT Yahoo Mail, see here:
http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/54829/~/bt-yahoo-mail---i%E2%80%99ve-lost-or-deleted-some-of-my-emails.-can-i-recover-them%3F

[murraymints]

your wee ears were burning Chris x

[tearinghair]

Sorry....BT mail (I don't think this is the same as Yahoo?)

[Buenchico]

At one time BT teamed up with Yahoo to provide their email service. Nowadays they seem to refer to just 'BT Mail' (without 'Yahoo' in the name) and BT's website fails to make it clear as to whether there's actually any difference in the services. (They 'moved' people from 'BT Yahoo Mail' to 'BT Mail' some time ago but it's unclear as to whether that was simply a rebranding exercise or an actual change in the service provider).

When you say that you can't access the emails via your PC, how are you trying to do it? Are you using a dedicated email client (such as Outlook, Windows 10 Mail or Thunderbird) or logging into your email account via the BT website. If it's the former then the latter might still work (or possibly vice versa).

[tearinghair]

via BT website. I tried putting the question on the internet in general, and the consensus seems to be that anything permanently deleted in BT mail is not recoverable (I suppose 'permanently deleted' is the clue...) Would it be worth trying a Restore point?

[Buenchico]

System Restore on a Windows PC only takes registry files back to a former state; it doesn't recover data. (Anyway, your email were never actually on your PC anyway; they were stored on BT's mail server in the same way that the page you're now viewing is stored on AB's server and not actually 'on' your computer).

I can't think of anything that you could do on an Android (or other) tablet either.

Sorry!

[tearinghair]

OK. many thanks to you and everyone for the advice. I'll be more careful in future (though I don't think I did anything different from previous times). A very happy New Year to all.

[Tuvok]

Check the bin/trash/deleted items in your email - if you haven't emptied it, or if the settings in your email program have not been set to "empty on exit" then they should be there.

They won't be in the bin of the computer.

There are 2 ways to access your email (other than loging on to the webmail option) - these are POP and IMAP.

If you use POP then the mail is taken from the server onto your computer/tablet.

If you use IMAP then the mail is NOT taken to the computer/tablet, but is left on the server, which is why you see identical results on your computer and tablet.

[tearinghair]

That was the first thing I checked, Tuvok. I think what happened was that I did a 'select all' and 'delete all' on my tablet email inbox by mistake (intending to do just Trash and Sent). Recently I've had a red 'sync is not working' message on my PC, so maybe when I changed that it messed things up. I'm afraid I don't understand your advice about Pop and Imac. I don't have enough confidence to do anything too technical.

[tearinghair]

Imap, I mean!