Mail oder then 2 months not visible???

[Richard G]

Today a customer had a question.
He uses imap accounts and can only see his mail back until April 2nd.
Another user of his company only can see mail from May, while she also should have older mail.

I checked via webmail and indeed I can't get any further than April 2nd. Also if checked via SSH, mail is starting from April 2nd.
There should be mail present even from last year.

Where is it gone?

I do have this set:
Automatically Purge Spambox/Trash data 30 days.
However, that should be only Spam and Trash, not inbox messages. And on another inbox from the same company, I found some mails from january and february.

Could this be an Outlook setting that is deleting the old mails? If yes, what setting could it be?

 

[Daniel_Dog]

Today a customer had a question.
He uses imap accounts and can only see his mail back until April 2nd.
Another user of his company only can see mail from May, while she also should have older mail.

I checked via webmail and indeed I can't get any further than April 2nd. Also if checked via SSH, mail is starting from April 2nd.
There should be mail present even from last year.

Where is it gone?

I do have this set:
Automatically Purge Spambox/Trash data 30 days.
However, that should be only Spam and Trash, not inbox messages. And on another inbox from the same company, I found some mails from january and february.

Could this be an Outlook setting that is deleting the old mails? If yes, what setting could it be?

Just a basic questions:
1. Are the emails present in the imap folder of the user of the domain?

 

[Richard G]

Thank you but your question was already answered:

Also if checked via SSH, mail is starting from April 2nd.

So no they are not. They start April 2nd.
I checked the /cur directory in all cases.

As stated, other mailboxes from the same company (same domain) do have older mails.
So this makes me think even more that it might be some Outlook setting on those 2 accounts which do not have older mails.

 

[Daniel_Dog]

Thank you but your question was already answered:

So no they are not. They start April 2nd.

As stated, other mailboxes from the same company (same domain) do have older mails.
So this makes me think even more that it might be some Outlook setting on those 2 accounts which do not have older mails.

Yes apps like Outlook can be configured to auto delete "old" emails. So you may want to rule that out.

 

[Richard G]

Please to not quote complete posts.

Yes I do want to rule that out, that's why I asked my question where to find it.

 

[Daniel_Dog]

To where to find it, it depends on the email client.
For outlook desktop this may help: https://support.exclaimer.com/hc/en...remove-older-emails-from-Exchange-and-Outlook
It says its for exchange accounts but i see no reason why it would not work for imap/smtp accounts.

 

[Daniel_Dog]

And do you maybe have a backup of the old deleted emails?
If so try to restore them and see if they remain or get deleted within a week or so.

 

[Richard G]

Thank you, I will have a look at that link.
As for backups, no we do cheap hosting, customers are responsible themselves for making backups.
That is why we advise customers to backup, use tools like Mailstore Home or use an external mail service like Office 365.
Or pay extra to create regular backups for them. But since most do not want to add the backup service, they have to take care of it themselves.

We do create customer backups irregularly anyway, but not in the last 3 months.

 

[Richard G]

Oke, checked again. No archiving present.
Also it seems only to have happened to his inbox, so the "cur" folder.
Other folders do have older mail and other users also have other mails in their inbox, so only 1 account and also only the inbox.


Customer says he never deletes anything. However Exim does not either.
Since he did not report this sooner, there are no logfiles anymore. The oldes logs is starting April 18th.

Some system engineer for a company he visits, told him something about latency (or a word sounding like that) would cause the issue. But imho that might be something for Exchange. Because I never heard of Exim automatically deleting mails.

So I have no clue. Unless somebody can tell me in certain cases DA or Exim will delete mail from inboxes.

Any command known that can find quickly if mails are deleted? Because if I search for deleted, I also get the deleted=0 and there are so many entry's that I'm looking for a faster method.

 

[ikkeben]

If one has tried to acces over pop client and have settings for that / such connection smtp server ... delete after ... days.

Don't know if you have ports open or close for pop.

Or other device as android or else with some settings for deletion or done there.

Also then important to do backups for that BOX/USER now, and see when which dates are deleted for future.

( has roundcude webmail settings for purge/delete ? )

If someone had settings for deletion but changed afterwards this into no delete and that person "don't know" anymore you can't find out.
If settings is still there somewhere you see also mails after 2 april will get deleted depending on when the connections are ..

Could also be a setting / config somewhere or thing done as move.

You can see in log files or imap or pop connections, if you have old log files from older dates for mail.

 

[Richard G]

( has roundcude webmail settings for purge/delete ? )

I don't know. Does Roundcube has something like that? If yes, the user must have activated that, which I doubt because he never does webmail.

It might be he deleted the older posts after April 2nd, maybe even this month, but it's no doable to manually look where deleted, expunged or trashed has another value then 0.

I don't have older logs, oldest logs as said is April 18th.

Might be a good idea to backup their mail for a short time, however, I have to wait until the new version is stable, because I can now only backup the whole account, and I don't want to do that yet.

 

[ikkeben]

I don't know. Does Roundcube has something like that? If yes, the user must have activated that, which I doubt because he never does webmail.

It might be he deleted the older posts after April 2nd, maybe even this month, but it's no doable to manually look where deleted, expunged or trashed has another value then 0.

I don't have older logs, oldest logs as said is April 18th.

Might be a good idea to backup their mail for a short time, however, I have to wait until the new version is stable, because I can now only backup the whole account, and I don't want to do that yet.

YOU can however make a copy (tar/zipped) of the mail directory from that user.

There are also scripts to copy imap folders. to other mail... sofar i remember

 

[Richard G]

YOU can however make a copy (tar/zipped) of the mail directory from that user.

Yeah I know, but that is nice if it has use. At this moment it's no use as the mails are just gone.
I found 32 mails from March in a deleted folder, which I copied just to be sure.

 

[ikkeben]

Yeah I know, but that is nice if it has use. At this moment it's no use as the mails are just gone.
I found 32 mails from March in a deleted folder, which I copied just to be sure.

IF mails in deleted folder that are not purged as should, hmm is his pc/device or useraccount local restored or such thing

 

[Richard G]

No he didn't restore anything, but on the server there are 2 folders for deleted items, one in English and one in Dutch, probably because he's using the Dutch Outlook version. I've seen this before.
Anyway, I'll tell him about the 32 mails from march and he knows about the send items. So he has to take care more. Or create backups regularly.