by Reader Chris Sinclair would love to have a copy of his old email. He writes.
My company has used Gmail for a few years and recently switched to Office 365. The IT department said that it would be removing my old Gmail but I wasn’t worried about it because I had a copy of that mail in Outlook (which is the email client I use). I launched Outlook the other day and started searching for an old message. I found it but suddenly it and almost all of my old email disappeared before my eyes. Can I get it back? What’s going on?
Having gone through a similar experience I can tell you exactly what happened. You had a Gmail IMAP account, which feeds messages from a central server. The relationship between your computer and this server is such that when messages are deleted from one, they also disappear from the other unless you’ve taken specific steps to back them up.
Some time before you last launched Outlook, the folks in charge of transitioning your email from Gmail to Microsoft deleted your old Gmail messages. When you launched Outlook it showed you a list of the email messages it currently held. However, it then synced with the server, found that a load of those messages had been deleted, and then set about to do the same thing with the locally stored copies. So, they were there one second and gone the next.
The important question is what you can do about it. The first is to pray that the IT department archived those messages and can provide you with access to them. Ask nicely, please.
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