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DSW's avatar
DSW
New Contributor

Email retention and Thunderbird

Hi

I finally found a post that answered my years- long problem - my emails were being deleted after 2 months. I found a post indicating that Cox's policy is to delete unread emails after 60 days; I was NEVER told this when signing up, and tech support people who tried to solve the problem over the years never mentioned it. The problem is I use Thunderbird as an email client, set to  download emails and leave them on the server until I delete them. Thunderbird (like the discontinued Outlook Express provided by Cox) has NO setting to mark as read emails left on the server, so this seems to explain why they are deleted. Since Thunderbird has much more powerful search and multi-account capabilities I use the web-based email only when away from my PC; I expected the emails to remain on the server as a backup, which they are not  (I do back up my PC in preparation for the inevitable hard drive failure, but the backups are stored locally.)  Does anybody have a method to automatically mark them as read on the Cox server after download?

p.s. Interestingly, the new Cox email app started up today and sent 2 months of duplicate emails to Thunderbird, and shows my email quota at 100%, which it obviously isn't.  Just in case someone else notices this also.

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  • ColleenD's avatar
    ColleenD
    Moderator
    DSW,

    Our email retention policy has been the same for quite some time, 10 years or more I think. You can read more at https://www.cox.com/aboutus/policies/speeds-and-data-plans.html.

    Outlook Express was an email client included with older Microsoft Windows versions and was not ever provided by Cox. As far as marking items in your Cox email as read using any email client, this would depend on a number of things. The first being how your email account is configured in the client.

    If you're using POP settings, messages would not be marked read on the server when read in your client. If you use IMAP settings they would, assuming you're marking messages as read in the email client you're using.

    I'm not aware of any options in any mail client using POP with the option to leave a copy of the messages on the server to mark those messages as read as they are downloaded.