Email Messages Missing

March 04, 2026 21:03
Updated

Symptoms

When accessing your email account, you notice some or all of your messages are no longer present.

Cause

When an email goes missing, it is often from a user moving the messages to the Trash folder or accessing the account with a mail client that downloads and deletes the mail from the server.

Note: that, by default, Dovecot doesn't log what happens to an email message once it has been delivered to a user's mailbox. The mail-log plugin must be enabled for Dovecot to log post-delivery activity.

Resolution

If the messages have been moved to the Trash folder, they can be moved back into the Inbox. If the messages have been removed from the server, the account will have to be restored from a backup.