Your email provider does not back up deleted emails
Redundant storage keeps your mailbox online, but it does nothing for the email you deleted last Tuesday. To get that back, you need a backup.
Ask your provider whether your email is safe and they will say yes. What they mean is that it stays available: if a disk fails, a server reboots or a datacentre loses power, your mailbox is still there. Good providers are genuinely good at this.
A backup is for something else: getting back a message that has gone. Usually the server had nothing to do with it. Someone deleted the message, a mail app wiped a folder during a migration, or an attacker cleaned out a hacked account.
Why replication does not protect against deletions
Redundancy means keeping the same data on several disks, often in more than one building. When you delete a message, the deletion is copied to every replica, just as the message was. Replicas are supposed to stay identical. So redundancy does nothing when someone with access to the mailbox deletes things, and that is one of the usual ways email gets lost.
The server trash gives you some leeway, usually thirty days, sometimes less depending on the plan. If a folder is emptied in March and someone notices in June, the trash will not help.
Read your hosting contract: it covers access to the mailbox, rarely the recovery of deleted email.
Three cases a hosting plan does not cover
The first is the everyday one. Someone reorganises their mailbox, a rule goes wrong, or a mail app syncs the wrong way, and a folder vanishes from the server. It can be weeks before anyone notices.
The second is an attack. Once someone has broken into an account and sent email from it, they usually delete what they sent. Ransomware on a computer that syncs the mailbox can also delete or encrypt folders.
The third is a change of contract. You switch provider, or a client ends their contract with you, and the mailbox is closed along with the contract. What happens to its contents is no longer up to you.
- How long deleted messages stay recoverable, in days.
- Whether you can restore a single message, or only the whole mailbox.
- What happens to the data on the day the contract ends.
Having your own copy
A useful backup sits somewhere other than your provider, in an account you own. It runs on a schedule you choose, and you can open it without asking anyone. That is how istorel works: it connects to the mailbox over IMAP, read-only, copies new messages on a schedule, and lets you search for a message and download it as an .eml file without restoring the whole mailbox.
You keep your provider. The backup covers the cases it does not.