until two days ago mail showed every email i'd received, now it's only showing the last 7 days and older emails seem to have disappeared, any ideas..?

Do you have more than one device accessing emails? For instance, an iMac, a laptop, an iPhone, and an iPad all accessing the same email? If one of them is configured to delete mail from the server after one week, this will happen and the other devices can then "lose" older emails, especially if you are using imap and one device is misconfigured as POP email.

Sometimes settings get changed inadvertently.

Check the settings for mail on each of your devices. Compare what email you have on the different devices.

Are they all set up for imap? Or for POP protocol? If one is different from the others, that can cause issues like you are seeing.

If you are using imap, look under Mail, Preferences, Advanced (for that account). Do you have it keep copies for offline viewing for one or more devices? If POP, under Advanced, do you have one or more devices configured to delete mail messages from the server after a certain number of days?

Are you missing messages from all of your devices after 7 days, or is it just one or two?

There are a number of combinations that can cause the problem you are seeing.

All three should be on imap then. If one is on POP, that can cause problems like what you are seeing and it should be changed to imap to be like the others, for the same email account.

Without going into a lot of technical detail, imap is used where the email server (e.g. GMAIL, MS-EXCHANGE, etc.) keeps all the emails physically, and you view them on your local device, which can also keep a local copy. But the emails are retained on the server at the email provider facility. POP is different -- with POP, the emails are physically copied to your local device, and are deleted from the email provider facility based on how you configure each POP device. Delete one week after downloading is a common POP setting, which is why I was asking.

If all your devices are imap, and you see no settings on any of them that either deletes mail after one week or puts a limit on "sync" beyond 1 week (iphones are sometimes configured to show emails only going back 1 week), you may need to log on directly to the email server, say with a web browser, to see what is there. The process may be different with different providers, for GMAIL one goes to GMAIL.COM and you log in and can see all the imap emails, which should also match what is on your local devices using imap.

You never indicated what your email provider is.

Check your DELETED or TRASH folders for mail on each devices. Also check all your mailboxes carefully to make sure you aren't missing one that has the rest of the emails.

iyorke64 wrote:

Thanks again

I have a feeling that the imac is POP as i remember setting it to delete from server after one week as we had some problems with the email server filling up, but why would this just start happening now?

email server/provider is our web hosting company

deleted and trash folders only contain meesages that i've trashed, these however go back much longer than 7 days, almost 2 months in some cases?

could i change the others to POP rather than the imac to imap, can't seem to find an option for this on either the macbook or iphone

If you set it up as POP on one computer and configured to delete after one week, that's what apparently caused this. As for, why did it start happening now? Well, the deletion from the server when using POP only happens when the Mail program is running and retrieving email -- is the iMac retrieving mail manually or somehow not always on with Mail running?

I suggest you consult with this article on this topic: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3228 It has a lot of information on this topic, including how to coordinate when you have multiple devices.

To switch from imap to POP, I think you need to set up a new POP mail account in your Mail program on a Mac or an iphone. I don't think you can switch from one to another in an existing account. So I'd leave the old imap account as is as an archive but under Mail Preferences for the old imap account, uncheck the box under Advanced for "Include when automatically checking for new messages" so it stops downloading to it and instead downloads to the new POP account you'll be setting up.

If you indeed had POP on the iMac, that computer should still have all the emails including the ones that have apparently been removed from your other devices. What I think happened is that the iMac deleted emails from the server older than 1 week after it received them (but it should have them since it received them). The other two devices on imap simply synchronize with the server, hence they lost all emails older than 1 week. But those emails should still be on your POP machine.

iyorke64 wrote:

another thought, if i do change the imac to imap will i loose the emails i already have?

If you change to imap, what happens may depend on how your email server is configured. But I believe that changing to imap will synchronize your iMac with the server which means it will lose emails older than one week. This is probably not what you want. You may be able to file those older emails into local mail folders stored on your Mac (not on the server), and only the In Box gets synchronized with the server, meaning that you would still have all those emails even after switching from POP to imap.

SInce you mentioned not wanting to fill up your server, I think using imap is not what you want here, you want to use POP, which will remove the emails from your server after some amount of time that you specify. imap keeps all emails on the server, basically forever.