How To Avoid Losing E-Mail

The "Worst Case" Scenario

You are working on mail via the EUI WebMail interface. You cancel a message from your Inbox (or other folder) and then immediately empty your Deleted Items folder.

You are working on your mail using a PC e-mail client program (like Mozilla Thunderbird) with the option to 'Leave messages on server' unselected or 'Delete from host once successfully retrieved' set.

You delete a message from your Inbox (or other folder) and then empty your Trash folder. (Variation: you have set your mail options in such a way as to immediately delete messages without even putting them into the Trash folder!)

If one of these things has taken place, your mail really is gone unless you previously had made a copy elsewhere.

The Computing Service cannot restore your mail. (Refer to the policy document on Backup/Restore of User E-Mail .) As you can see, however, you really do have to work at it to completely lose your mail, so if you don't purposely go and (re)set things up to bypass the Trash folder, this won't happen "by accident".

 

A Tale of Two Sites

When investigated, calls about lost e-mail come from users who have multiple PCs, i.e. who read their mail on more than one PC. Both of the PCs are either connected via EUI-internal network connections (e.g., the person has two offices, each with a PC [1] ) or via a direct modem dial-in to the EUI (e.g., an office PC and a PC at home in Florence).

Almost always, the mail is not lost--it just is not seen by one or the other of the computers. This is because the user will have been reading the mail on both machines with some PC e-mail client programme. Investigating the advanced options settings, we find that on one (or both) of the PCs, the option to 'Delete from server once successfully downloaded' is checked. This means that when the mail is read on the PC where the option is checked, it is moved off the server--as a consequence, the other PC, the next time it goes to check for new mail, certainly won't be able to see what's not there anymore!

With POP3 mail servers there is no "solution" to this "problem". You, as a user working on two machines, just have to understand the situation and make a choice about how you wish to manage it.

You should realize that, if you uncheck the 'Delete ... from server ...' option on both PCs, your server e-mail space will eventually get totally full and, sooner or later, no more messages will arrive at all--they will automatically be bounced back to the sender.

So, if you do uncheck this option you'll have to clean up your server mail space regularly, "manually". The easiest way to do a cleanup is via our EUI WebMail interface because with it you are working directly on that server space. 

 

[1]  By "more than one PC" we do not mean switching among the common access (e.g. Terminal Room) PCs. You've certainly already noticed that in the common access areas, moving from PC to PC makes no difference in what you see in your mailbox.