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Cox - Please Consider Changing Your Email Retention Policy (and make sure your agents are aware of current policy)
Cox has a policy where any unread email in a user's inbox is deleted after 60 days.
This isn't a big problem when I use POP to access my email since all messages are downloaded to my computer and it doesn't matter if messages are eventually removed from the server by Cox. I would like to switch over to IMAP access, however. Since an IMAP account essentially reflects what is on the server, automatic deletion of messages by Cox is now a problem.
This email deletion policy doesn't make a lot of sense to me since Cox will indefinitely retain any "read" email or any unread email transferred to a folder outside of the inbox. Why should Cox care if a message is read or unread?
The only way I can avoid these deletions is to mark the message as read before it reaches the 60 day threshold, or move it from the inbox. Other than writing a custom script, there doesn't seem to be a automatic way to do this. I can create a rule within my email client (Mac Mail), but I would need to manually apply the rule on a daily basis since rules automatically run only on new messages.
Keeping Unread messages has some importance to users. The Preview pane in a typical email client often gives me enough info to understand the response in a message without reading it. I also do web development work where I need to monitor system generated emails and it is useful to have access to historical emails to debug email issues - I shouldn't have to read each one in order to make sure it isn't deleted.
Your tech agents also do not seem to be aware of the email deletion policy. Two of them insisted on two separate occasions that there was no server-based automatic deletion of emails - anything I was experiencing had to be generated by a setting in my email client. This is obviously not correct (although based on their statement, I spent a lot of time trying to debug nonexistent email client issues).
If there are any Cox users who have figured out a workaround to this, I would be very interested in hearing about it.
MichaelJ
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chapmanla
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Thanks, MichaelJ, for your response.
I was aware of your suggestion but it isn't ideal for me. Creating a new folder does solve the deletion issue, but by using a folder you lose the ability to view messages for that account as part of an aggregated inbox for all of the accounts you access. In the mobile email clients I use, getting to an IMAP folder involves a lot of button pushing.
I guess I come back to my original question. Why delete read messages if they happen to remain in your inbox? As you pointed out, this deletion policy is easily circumvented by moving them into a folder, but why should we have to do this?
I had meant to mention another issue with this policy. If you access your account using only POP clients, then 100% of your emails are viewed as unread by the server, and 100% of them are deleted after sixty days. Say that you want to set up access to your account on a new mobile device. The maximum email history that you can get access to on that device is 60 days (I am not aware of any feature that would allow you to import historical email messages onto an iPhone).
If I am under the 2GB quota for a Cox email account, why can't I have access to all of my messages, even unread ones?
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