UKC

OK, so my BT (Yahoo) webmail account has been randomly deleting all old mails (older than a few weeks) at random intervals for several months (possibly years) and I can't understand why.
I get them restored worry that one time this may not work.

They have been through the macmail settings on my Mac, iPad and i phone and find nothing wrong. From time to time they suggest it has been hacked (with no evidence) but this time they confirm it has not been hacked.

Recently I started forwarding the mails to separate account so that they are saved somewhere so BT are now blaming that. Clearly balls because the problem long predated the forwarding.

Their current explanation is that "BT webmail cannot be used on more than one device so you'll have to delete the account from your macmail on your iPhone and iPad" although they refuse to put me through to a supervisor to confirm this line. It sounds like nonsense.

Personally I suspect BT has an unstable server which simply wipes out my old e mails. Has anyone got a better explanation and solution??

(I would leave BT but changing addresses is such a faff)

In reply to Postmanpat:

Are you using IMAP or POP3 to get the files?
Also when you log on via the web browser are they deleted there as well.

Depending on how it is set up it could seem to lose the emails once downloaded to one device (eg my thunderbird/gmail set up moves them to an alternate folder once downloaded).

In reply to dissonance:

IMAP on the mac and the iPhone, POP on the i pad. Yup, they disappear on the browser as well. That's my main concern, incase they can't restore them one time.

They already lost everything before Feb this year, although luckily I had most of them on an old laptop pop a/c.

In reply to Postmanpat:

I'd put money on it being your set-up and them being too stupid to help you fix it.

In reply to Philip:


Possibly, bizarrely they don't officially support iPads or iPhones, probably the two most used devices to receive e mail in the world.

In reply to Postmanpat:

I have BT account I don't use. So I just configured it in my email client (Thunderbird) as POP not IMAP and unlike GMail, Yahoo mail with POP does remove the messages from the server.

So that is probably the cause of your problem. You POP setup probably has "leave on server" for X days, so old messages are going.

In reply to Philip:

Yup, I've realised I have another very old mac I open very occasionally. That maybe the problem although I can't see any particular correlation between opening that and the disappearances.

In reply to Postmanpat:


I just tried on my iPad Air and the setup defaults to IMAP. In fact I can't see how you force a POP setup.

In reply to Postmanpat:


In your world perhaps, and I'm sure apple would like you to believe that. In reality they are a tiny proportion of devices accesing email.


In answer to your conundrum, I would guess that one of your devices is downloading and deleting messages from the server. On each device check your IMAP/POP3 settings, and you should find a check box that says "leave a copy of messages on the server" make sure this is checked on all devices.

I've used Yahoo for years on multiple devices and never had a problem once I'd made sure the setting was correct.

The only other thing I would suspect is that your mailbox is over the maximum allowed size and its deleting big emails, but I would presume that yahoo would have checked that first

In reply to balmybaldwin:


Fair comment. I'll rephrase, "in BT's world"




Thx,