New headache with new year

[dangerous]

Hi.

Today I gifted an older laptop to my daughter and deleted my email profile on that machine.

I now find that my entire inbox has vanished on all my other devices, but only for that one account (I have 3). All the sub folders are there with content, but the inbox is empty. The same applies to webmail. I use IMAP and would have expected t be able to access them from talktalk.

The other email addrreses are fine.  The associated ost file is present and occupies 3.07GB

Is there any way to recover these lost emails, and why did it happen, as it has happened before?

Help please.

[Gliwmaeden2]

Talktalk doesn't back up the emails, @dangerous.

See the post from Ady:

https://community.talktalk.co.uk/t5/Email/BACKUP-ALL-YOUR-EMAILS/td-p/2802958

[dangerous]

Thanks for the advice. 

I found a copy of the archive.pst from the laptop I was clearing  and imported that. At least some emails are now there, but the associated  account.pst file does not seem to have any inbox present. When importing, all the other files take time to load but the inbox either does not appear or vanishes too quickly to see

The odd thing is that every other folder in that account is still there including sent and that is all present and correct up to date.

Looks like inbox messages all are lost forever from 15/03/21 to 02/01/22, unless there is anyway to recover these via talktalk themselves.  Is there any chance say by inbox re-set or something? I thought that IMAP always stored the ortiginal mails on the server, so how can it have just vanished?

Is there a way to backup the emails via talktalk, as this has happened a couple of times before?

[Ady-TalkTalk]

Hi dangerous, Gondola has as always given you the right advice. Please let us know how you get on.

Ady

[Gondola]

Hi dangerous 

The Outlook OST file is a cached copy of the IMAP mailbox content. Put simply, deleting your Outlook account profile should not have deleted the Inbox content but deleting the Inbox content on the email account will delete the content in the online mailbox.

You can use an OST to PST file converter and import the PST file to another Outlook account to see if the OST file still contains the 'missing' Inbox content.