How to get back deleted email?

kfk822

I was having issues syncing my Spectrum email on my phone with webmail. The suggestion was to delete the account from my phone and re-add it to fix the mapping, which I did. When I did that the last 2 1/2 years of my email was lost. It was no longer in my inbox, in archive, or in my trash. When I spoke to a customer service representative they told me this "happens sometimes" and "is common with Spectrum" and there is no way to recover the lost emails. I had extremely important emails that I need access to. Spectrum should not choose to delete emails without proper notice to the individual. That is proprietary information. In my opinion they should not be able to choose to delete emails at all, but at the very least warning the individual ahead of time so they can take necessary steps to save/fix the issue ahead of time would be proper customer service.

I am beyond disappointed in this. There doesn't seem to be a way to ever get those emails or those files back, and I'm at a loss.

Mo_S

Hello and welcome @kfk822,

Deleting the email account from the third party mail client wouldn't change emails on your account when accessed via spectrum.net. We would not be able to delete your emails or recover any emails that may be deleted by you. Have you logged into spectrum.net and used the "Check Email" option? I'm showing over 53,000 emails in the mailbox associated with this profile, mostly in the inbox folder.

kfk822

Yes, I logged into spectrum.net with the "Check email" option and I have no emails between 5/21/24 - 9/12/26. They are completely gone and wiped and it happened simultaneously while I was adding/deleting the account from my phone, so I'm not sure if it was a glitch and unrelated. I am not seeing the same amount of emails you are though. Before the glitch I had 56,000 emails so 5000 were deleted. (I now see 51,000 emails). I'm aware I was close to storage capacity, which I was working to fix. However I don't understand why 2 1/2 years of my inbox was deleted that I did already have. That is not something that I was clearing out.

HT_Greenfield

I'd write it off to you mistakenly using POP3 instead of IMAP during that while, and by "mistakenly," i mean contrary to the official guidance to use IMAP as it has stood for years upon years, and furthermore not realizing how POP3 works and what it does by default.

🔗 https://www.spectrum.net/support/internet/mobile-email-setup 🔍 👀

🔗 https://help.aol.com/articles/what-is-the-difference-between-pop3-and-imap 🔍 😳

kfk822

That is very possible, but would that have accidentally deleted 2 1/2 years worth of emails?

HT_Greenfield

By default, the POP3 client would have been downloading and then deleting the messages from the server ongoingly by design and then you accidentally deleted their only existence from the POP3 client, and by "accidentally," i mean by using POP3 contrary to the guidance and furthermore not realizing how it works and what it does by default. If it's an iPhone running daily iCloud backups or an Android phone running daily Google backups, you might have been able to get them back by wiping the device and restoring it to the most recent daily backup if done soon enough before its next daily backup but you might not have realized that either.

Unknown

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kfk822

Even if our inbox was too full and we "shouldn't have let it get that bad" we should've been given a warning that they would choose to mass delete our emails rather than go ahead and do it so we lose all our history.

I tried to do re connect my email on my phone as per above instructions and that still was not a solve and did not sync my email properly. To your point I plan on shifting my email accounts over to another company since there doesn't seem to be a fix or a recovery solution.