Lost emails can be a frustrating ordeal, disrupting workflow and causing unnecessary stress. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore how to pinpoint the reasons behind missing emails and effectively recover them, ensuring you stay on top of your communication game without unnecessary setbacks.

Common causes

Using POP3

When using POP3, your email program downloads all your emails to your device when you check your inbox. If new emails arrive after you’ve already checked, you won’t see them until you check your inbox again. This can sometimes lead to missing emails if you don’t check frequently or if there’s a delay in checking. It’s like grabbing all the letters from your mailbox before the mailman delivers the latest ones. To avoid missing emails when using POP3, you can consider these steps:

1. Check your email regularly: make it a habit to check your email inbox frequently, so you’re less likely to miss any new messages.

2. Consider using IMAP instead: IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) is an alternative to POP3 that keeps your emails stored on the email server rather than downloading them to your device. This means you can access your emails from multiple devices, and you won’t miss any messages, even if you check your email from different places.

3. Double-check spam and junk folders: Sometimes emails can be mistakenly marked as spam and end up in your spam or junk folder. Make sure to check these folders regularly to ensure you’re not missing any important messages.

Filter settings in webmail and email clients (Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook, etc.)

Some email filters end up being responsible for preventing specific emails from reaching your mailbox. Such emails are still shown in the hPanel logs, giving the impression that they have disappeared for no apparent reason.

Emails deleted by removing a domain from a hosting plan

If you delete a website from your hosting plan, the linked email service is also deleted, including all the emails. In this case, all you need to do is re-create the email accounts and contact us to restore the lost emails.

Tips and Solutions

Backup your emails

Get into the habit of creating email backups regularly (every week or so), so that you always have a copy of your emails in case they are extremely important.

Check access logs
​Access logs show who and when connected to an email account and if there were any removed emails in that login session.

Archive old emails

Outlook allows you to automatically archive old emails for as long as you like: Archive older items automatically – Microsoft Support.

Finally, you can always reach out to us – to help you, we’ll need the sender’s and recipient’s email addresses.