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ShadyLar's avatar
ShadyLar
New Contributor II
7 years ago

Disappearing emails

I've had a Cox email address and account for roughly 20 years.

But over the last several months my older emails have started disappearing, everything before a given date. Initially I lost all emails in my inbox from about two months back, then about one month previous, and now everything before one to two weeks back! (Today is Sept 24 and all my emails before Sept 12 have been deleted.)

I primarily use two IMAP email clients, Mac Outlook and Mac Airmail 3. The lost Cox emails are automatically reflected in both email clients. If I move an email to another folder or star/flag it, it remains accessible, but if I don't act on it in time, it is soon lost. This is very frustrating, as several critical emails I needed to access have vanished into the ether.

I have only used 185 MB of my allotted 2 GB, so I'm not close to approaching my quota. I can find nothing in settings or elsewhere to change this action. This problem has occurred similarly in both the old and new Cox email formats.

Hope someone can help. Thanks!

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  • JonathanJ's avatar
    JonathanJ
    Former Moderator
    7 years ago
    @ShadyLar

    Have you tried logging into webmail and see if the email are there http://webmail.cox.net?

  • ShadyLar's avatar
    ShadyLar
    New Contributor II
    7 years ago

    Yes, the first thing I tried. The two email clients both reflect the Cox webmail.

    Emails continue to disappear, doing so for the last few months. Today is 11th of October and all my Inbox emails before the 4th of October have been scrubbed.

    Has to be a solution somewhere. Thanks.

  • socal_transplan's avatar
    socal_transplan
    Contributor III
    7 years ago

    There is. 

    Use some other vendor for email!

    cox has no clue what it's doing to us and they don't care!

  • GregP1's avatar
    GregP1
    Moderator
    7 years ago

    Hi Shadylar,

    There can be several reasons the emails are being deleted here are a few of the most common.

    Unread emails are automatically removed from the Inbox on the server after 60 days. This cannot be configured by the user however you can work around this by either moving unread items into a folder you have created or by simply marking them as read.

    Your cox email can be set up on clients as either IMAP or POP.
    -IMAP will synchronize the Client with what is on the server.
    -POP will download the emails onto the client and has an option to leave the messages on the server or delete them after downloading (be sure that it is set to leave on server or convert this to IMAP.

    It's not uncommon for modern email clients to default to removing all items from the server older than a specified amount of time, say two weeks for example. I would look at the account settings for your email client for the settings which determine when email is removed from the server to see exactly what is going on.

  • ShadyLar's avatar
    ShadyLar
    New Contributor II
    7 years ago

    As I noted on my first post, both my email clients are IMAP. I read all incoming emails and so have no problem with anything unread being removed after 60 days. 

    Of course, the first thing I checked was the settings and preferences on Airmail and Outlook. There are no such removal options, just as there are none for Cox emails. These now lost emails must originate with Cox, then are picked up by the clients; yet all client emails (whether currently accessible or removed before a certain date) exactly match those on the Cox server.

  • ColleenD's avatar
    ColleenD
    Moderator
    7 years ago
    ShadyLar,

    You mentioned primarily using 2 devices. Have you had your Cox email account configured on any other devices? What you describe really sounds like something is configured with POP settings and has the option to delete items that are a certain age. I know Outlook configured via POP will not only remove messages from the server when it syncs but will typically delete emails over 14 days old.


  • kmich2000's avatar
    kmich2000
    New Contributor
    7 years ago

    I am also having the same issue.  I have several email accounts but only 1 has the issue of disappearing emails in my inbox.  They are not even in there a day and they disappear.  The account is IMAP. Very frustrating as I have been asked why I am not responding to emails sent to this account.  I can't find the answer.  I only use one computer, no phone, tablet, for email.