You probably also have that desktop email program configured to automatically check for email every so often – perhaps 5 minutes, perhaps 30 or more, but the key is that you don’t have to be around.Thus when it checks for email it moves that email to your PC, removing it from the mail server.
#Why do emails disappear from my gmail inbox Pc
You have your desktop email program configured to download your email to your PC using POP3.IMAP is perfect for today’s world where we can assume connectivity most of the time, and it’s not at all uncommon to want to access email from different devices and in different ways at different times. Multiple devices could all be accessing that mail server at the same time.Your device is simply a “window” into that master copy. The mail server is the official place that email is kept, not your device.It synchronizes in such a way that when you delete on your device, it’s deleted on the server when you read on your device, it’s marked as read on the server when you move things around in folders on your device, things are moved around in folders on the server. IMAP differs in that instead of moving mail to the device you’re using, it simply makes a copy without removing anything from the server unless you tell it to. Most email programs that run on mobile devices use a different protocol, called IMAP, to access email. When a mobile phone accesses email, it does so from your email service provider, of course, but it does so in a different way. In recent years, however, both of those reasons have pretty much been dispensed with. Mail service providers often limited the amount of space you could use anyway, often to a small enough amount that even the mail that accumulated over a multi-week vacation could exceed what’s called the “quota”, or the amount of space you’d been allocated.Your PC was where you dealt with your mail, so there was no point in having anything on the server after it was downloaded.This actually made a lot of sense for many reasons, the two most common being: The result is that after the email is copied to your PC, it’s removed from the mail service’s server. POP3, by default, moves the email from the email server to your PC. What that really means is that the programs are configured to use the POP3 email fetching protocol. I’ll review what I think is happening, and then explore the alternatives to fix it.įor years, most desktop email programs were configured to download email from the email service to the computer on which they were running. Then in your email client, you can filter and move them back to your inbox and sent items.With more and more people reading email on their smartphones, this is actually a pretty common situation, as it’s very easy to misconfigure things when adding a phone to your setup and have email seemingly disappear. We will attempt to recover all the emails from that folder into a subfolder on your account called: recovered_mail_items (or something similar). This will be all mixed in together, inbox, sent items etc. IMPORTANT: We can only recover mails from the recoverable items folder (as shown in option 2 below). Simply raise a ticket by sending an email to asking us, please provide the email account in the subject line. To recover deleted emails through the webmail system, please follow the screens below.
#Why do emails disappear from my gmail inbox how to
In the case your email client has archived your emails, you will need to refer to the software vendor on how to recover them as each software does it differently. Because POP downloads all your emails to your local machine, when you delete emails, they will be on your local machine, not on the server. If you are using POP: you need to check in your deleted items folder on your local email client for the emails. If you are using IMAP: log in to the webmail system at and restore them to your inbox (see instructions further below). You have deleted your emails on purpose or by accident. You have another device somewhere downloading your emails.ģ. Your email client has decided to archive/purge your emails.Ģ. Now that we understand that, the situation where the inbox goes missing can ONLY occur when any one of the following actions are met:ġ. The server is just a stagnant database of data, a repository of information that does nothing until its either accessed either by webmail or an email client of some kind. You are reading this article because you have opened the inbox on your email client and emails appear as missing or the whole inbox is empty.įirstly, there is no bug causing any sort of deletions on the mail server.