Emails older than 2 weeks have disappeared from my inbox. My wife's have not, though we share the same iMac. It would appear the problem is not mine alone, yet there is no online help; there is no setting in mail which I could have inadvertently clicked to delete old emails etc etc.
Can anyone help; I need to retrieve old emails for taxation purposes?
iMac 21.5″, macOS 10.13
Hello theoneinch,
Ensuring you're able to view your emails is important and you've come to a great place for help. To confirm, have you signed in to your email providers website to see if the emails appear there? If the emails appear there, try the steps outlined in the following article. While the article references not being able to send or receive emails, the steps are still relevant to the issue you're facing. It may lead to signing out and back in to that email account using the steps listed below.
If you can’t send or receive email on your Mac
Let us know how that goes!
Did that and didn't work. It said it was downloading hundreds of emails, but I don't know where they went because they are not in my Inbox. Tried Rebuild and it said downloading 148, probably about right, but I don't know, again, where they went. Surely someone knows of a setting that restricts Inboxes to keeping only the last 2 weeks emails, so that the setting can be changed to "Keep all emails in Inbox, unless deleted"!!! Where are the "experts" with what is a common problem, according to the forums and blogsphere.
No, and I do know what you mean. My Inbox is only showing emails up to 16 September, no earlier. If I do search for an email I know I received in August, it says 0 found. I have logged into Telstra (Australia) webmail - same thing; no older emails beyond 2 weeks
Something may have happened around two weeks ago...
Is this an IMAP account? Or an Exchange account?
In any of these two cases (by far the most common nowadays), unless you copy or move messages to mailboxes under "On My Mac", your Mac will try to sync with the server every time. If the messages somehow disappeared from the server, they will not appear in your mac either.
I would try contacting the mail provider and see if there is some way to access backups that they may have.
IMAP account. Sounds bad as my service provider uses offshore IT people who are probably cheap, but you get what you pay for; invariably no resolution unfortunately. It is strange that my wife's email, on a shared iMac are all there as are my Trashed and Sent, but not my Inbox. Thanks for your advice, Luis.
Since the e-mail Client ( Apple Mail Application ) is configured using IMAP, it will reflect that which is appearing when you log into the Web Interface of this e-mail Provider.
As you have mentioned, the missing or disappearing e-mails are not On the Server - the same would appear in Apple Mail Application.
The Sent and Trash messages, again because they too are Reflecting the same on the Mail Server, they ( Sent and Trash ) would Count as part of the E-mail Storage Capacity offered by the Mail Server.
Personal Experience.
Have an Aunt of 95 Years old and e-mail from time to time. They kept Bouncing back. Come to find out, here e-mail Server was also using IMAP but being 95 and a Pack Rat, was keeping every single e-mail received.
Long story short - she had close to 20,000 e-mail in various folder including Trash and Sent. The Server had a Storage Capacity Limit of 200 GB .
Needles to say, some serious House Cleaning was required to drop her usage of Capacity below that level.
Understood; except that all my old emails are on my Android Galaxy 'phone and on my MacBook Air; but not on my/our iMac. I have asked Telstra and their Network Team is treating it as a matter of urgency! Yeah, right.
https://www.telstra.com.au/support/email/setup
And perhaps the ISP has an e-mail Capacity CAP on stored e-mails ?
Do you happen to have any text entered into the search box?
Do your emails all appear if you log in to your provider webmail interface?
Except that my wife's are all there, as are all my Trash and Sent
Disappearing emails
