Why your mail provider is not a backup
Redundant storage keeps your mailbox available. It does not keep the message you deleted last Tuesday. The difference is the whole job of a backup.
Ask a hosting provider whether your mail is safe and the answer is usually yes. It is also usually true, for the question they heard. Their job is availability: keeping the mailbox reachable when a disk dies, a machine reboots, or a datacentre loses power. They do that well, and they measure it.
A backup answers a different question: can I get back something that is gone? Not gone because the server broke, but gone because someone deleted it, because a client wiped a folder during a migration, or because an account was compromised and emptied on purpose.
Replication copies mistakes too
Redundancy means the same data exists on several disks, often in several buildings. When a message is deleted, the deletion is replicated as faithfully as the message was. That is the point: replicas must agree. It also means redundancy offers no protection against the most common cause of data loss, which has always been someone with legitimate access doing something regrettable.
Server-side trash softens this, but it is a window, not an archive. Thirty days is typical, sometimes seven. A folder emptied in March and noticed in June is not recoverable from trash on any plan we have seen.
Availability answers « is the mailbox up? ». A backup answers « can I get that email back? ». Only one of those is in your hosting contract.
Three situations a hosting plan does not cover
The first is ordinary: a mailbox is reorganised, a rule misfires, a mail client syncs the wrong way and a folder disappears from the server. Nobody notices for weeks.
The second is deliberate. An account is compromised, and the first thing an attacker does after sending from it is delete the evidence. Ransomware on a workstation that syncs the mailbox has the same effect from the other direction.
The third is administrative. You change provider, or a client leaves, and the mailbox closes with the contract. Whatever was in it is now someone else's decision.
- 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.
A copy you control
A backup worth having lives somewhere else, under your account, on a schedule you set, and can be read without asking anyone. That is the whole design brief for istorel: connect over IMAP, copy on a schedule, encrypt, and keep the result browsable so a single email can come back without restoring anything else.
None of it replaces your provider. It answers the other question.