Old pop3 mail disapears after 5 weeks from iPhone

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Old pop3 mail disapears after 5 weeks from iPhone

My friend has a BTConnect Email set up as POP on an iPhone, and has noticed that old emails seem to disappear off the phone after around 5 weeks, I have checked the Settings on the Phone and under Incoming Settings Delete from Server is set to NEVER, also under Deleted Messages Remove is also set to NEVER.

On the office PC the email client is set to remove messages from the server after 31 days and does manage to keep all old messages, that is also set to POP however, this should not affect the phone as my phone is also set to POP and any messages downloaded to the Phone or PC are stored on the device and it should not matter when the emails are deleted from the btconnect server as being POP as copy should always be stored on the Phone.

This apparently has only started happening in the last year.

Can anyone shed some light on why this is happening, as I am scratching my head on this one. I know that going down the exchange route would be better than POP but my boss wants to keep the BT Connect Email address which only offers POP as a mail protocol I cannot seem to convince him to change.

iPhone 13 Pro

Posted on Jul 8, 2022 9:46 AM

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Answer 1

destiny241

Community Specialist

Jul 9, 2022 2:19 PM in response to cdub74

Hello Cdub74,

You're definitely on the right path. Did you check on the web for this email account? Meaning, did you visit the BT Connect website and attempt to see if there are settings causing this there? This may be the link you're looking for: https://home.bt.com/login/loginform

Looking forward to hearing back from you soon, cheers.

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Answer 2

UTBadger

Community Specialist

Jul 10, 2022 2:38 PM in response to cdub74

cdub74,

Since this is a POP account and the messages are being pulled from the email server and downloaded locally, the 30 days setting likely won't have an impact as the emails wouldn't be stored on the email server.

At this point though, the best thing to do to start isolating things further would be to eliminate the computer from the equation. Perhaps test things out without the account enabled on your computer to see if the behavior persists while just using your iPhone or vice versa to start narrowing down the root cause.

Cheers!

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Answer 3

AnnieL2

Community Specialist

Jul 10, 2022 7:25 AM in response to cdub74

cdub74,

You mentioned this is happening on a friend's device but that you were checking/comparing settings from your device. Do you also have a computer pulling the emails from the same email service provider? Are the emails that are being deleted from your friend's iPhone still showing on their computer? Do they appear in a Trash folder?

Thanks.

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Answer 4

cdub74 Author

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Jul 10, 2022 6:14 AM in response to destiny241

BT Connect is a hosted email service built on Microsoft Exchange Online, but will only allow to connect via POP (no IMAP or Exchange access is avaliable to BT Connect Customers) which means all emails are downloaded locally to the iPhone and stored there and should be stored until the user deletes them from the Phone.

There is no setting I can see in the Outlook Webmail Access that would removed messages that should be locally stored on the iPhone. I shouldn't think that the POP server would have access to remove any messages that are stored locally on the phone.

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Answer 5

cdub74 Author

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Jul 10, 2022 2:27 PM in response to AnnieL2

I am checking the settings on my friends device. Yes they do have a computer pulling the emails as well this is set to delete the messages from the server after 30 days, they are staying on the computer, but being deleted from the Phone after around 5 weeks. There is nothing in their Trash folder apart from the messages they have intentionally deleted.

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Old pop3 mail disapears after 5 weeks from iPhone

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