I use webmail via btopenworld which is serviced by Yahoo. I no longer download my emails to my PC, as it is much more convenient to use webmail and I am still only 48% towards my 2GB limit. But when I went back to look for a specific email recently, virtually all the messages to one person (and there must have over 30) and his numerous responses had vanished from my Inbox and Sent box. How can this happen? Has anyone else had a similar experience? I certainly haven't deleted them and there are messages still in there from long before this correspondence. I assumed that the storage on webmail was secure. Carl Gardner
BT claims to provide a "comprehensive support site at http://www.bt.yahoo.com/help," which I can't access as I don't have an account. I doubt that it contains any help for missing mail, so you will have to try to get an email address for the support team and hope that your email can be retrieved.
Either way, no, I don't believe you can rely on any webmail service to preserve your email. They may not delete it deliberately (like Hotmail) but they can lose mail due to technical errors or as a result of human or billing or banking errors (if the system thinks you have left the service, or whatever). There's also the risk that a webmail service provider will go bust, or its data centre might burn down, or it could be hit by an earthquake and slide into the sea.
For security and ease of access, you should always keep a local copy of email or at least copy the really important messages to another webmail service such as Yahoo Mail or Gmail.
