Lost messages

When you can't find a message and it seems to have gone missing, it's almost always caused by one of the reasons listed on this page. Please check carefully to see if any of them could apply.

If you accidentally deleted an email, please check your Trash folder first. If the message is still there, you can move it back to your Inbox.

If the message is not in your Trash, you may still be able to use our Restore tool to restore it from backup. This tool will recover any messages that have been deleted within the past 7 days.

If you still don't know what happened, please contact our support team. They will be able to investigate what happened to any message received, moved, or deleted within the last 7 days, and advise what you can do to prevent this from happening again.

POP access

Most POP clients delete emails off the server once they've downloaded them. Check if you have a computer or another email service (like Gmail or Yahoo) set up to POP download emails from your account.

Rules

Discard or forwarding rules could be sending the messages to the Trash folder as they arrive. Check if you have any of these rules set up on the Settings → Mail Rules screen. If you use an email client, it may also have its own set of rules or filters. Make sure you check these as well.

Accidental deletion or move

If you use the Select all checkbox to select messages, not all selected messages may be visible if there are more messages than will fit on a single page. If you select all and then delete or move all of the messages, be sure that you've selected the correct messages.

Check your Trash folder to see if the message has been accidentally deleted. You should also search all folders in case the messages have been accidentally moved to a folder you weren't expecting.

Compromised account

This is less likely, but it's possible that someone else logged into your account and deleted your emails. Check your login log for any logins you don't recognize:

  1. Go to Settings → Privacy & Security.
  2. Find the Logged in sessions section and click Review. A new screen should appear.
  3. Click View all logins in the last 4 weeks.

If you see anything odd, immediately change your password and scan your computers for malware. See below for how to recover the deleted emails.

Known issue with Apple

If you are an Apple Mail user and you've noticed that emails seem to be disappearing from your Trash folder, you may want to check your Apple client.

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