Baffling email problem - Help needed.

I have a notebook with Windows 10 & Outlook. And I have an email ending in bell.net. Some time ago I started using the online Bell portal to access my emails, and I'd like to switch over entirely, but here's the problem. Bell mail deletes my incoming emails after 14 days, so I never have more than 14 days worth of emails. I have fought with Bell for months about this problem, but they insist they cannot find anything on their end. Thankfully I have a copy in Outlook, but I want all my received emails to stay in my inbox.

Could there be some function or option in Outlook that is telling the Bell server to delete my emails after 14 days? If so, where would I find such a setting inside Outlook?

 

The 14 day limit is imposed by the ISP. If you want to keep everything setup auto forwarding to another e-mail like gmail. Once it's there it's there until you hit a 15GB limit,. Sometimes using Outlook w/ ISP e-mail services pulls the online copy completely w/o leaving one on the server/online view but, you're describing them deleting it completely after the time period is up.

I've been dealing with ISP's for decades and I've yet to see one with a stringent 14 day retention policy. That's pretty aggressive and painfully cumbersome to say the least. I haven't bothered using an ISP provided e-mail though in well... ever. When I started online I didn't want to tie my ID to an ISP knowing there was a good chance I would be changing them over the years for faster speeds / better deals. Then again I work with tech for a living so, the foresight was a little bit built in even in the days of dial up and BBS'.

 

Thanks for the reply, but it's hard to imagine that Bell limits all of their customers to 14 days. My old ISP, Cogceo, stored received emails indefinitely.

 

I'm not familiar enough with "bell" to specifically say if this is a fluke of your account or somethin in Outlook triggering the issue. Typically though if you setup Outlook to leave a copy on the server it should sit here until it's deleted locally or on webmail. Having worked for a couple of ISP's though there are some tricks to reprovisioning things that sometimes flush out quirks in the systems and clear issues.

Sometimes cancelling out the account (rolling) and setup again will purge the issue. Most of these systems though sometimes increment the UID to add a number to the end of it when setting them up again in the billing system. There might be a level 3 technician tool though that front line agents aren't aware of that can manually clear the account setting or it's possible in webmail there's a setting under your account to change the duration as well.

A lot if these ISP systems have processes that are triggered when making changes in billing and cascade as the work orders get processed. When dealing with oddities like this and other weird things I would simply roll an account and 9/10 it would fix the issues in about 2 minutes.

If one of their engineers though changed something across the board to 14 days though it might take a little more of a push to get them to investigate it further. Get a Ticket # from them for tracking things and this pushes them into an SLA situation where they get graded on handling the issue in their annual reviews.

 

Outlook does have a setting that deletes mail from the server after a period of time - Do yourself a favor and remove your Outlook account if you plan on using Webmail.

But as others mentioned, using Gmail to check your Bell mail is a fantastic option.