Fun With Verizon

Humph.

I logged into my Windows Live Mail account on my desktop computer this morning. The inbox filled with new stuff, as usual. I scrolled down through it, as usual, and...

Discovered that anything older than the 14th was gone. Everything that I'd left in the inbox from before, for whatever reason, had disappeared. I logged into my Verizon email account online, and it was the same thing -- nothing in the inbox older than the 14th. The Gmail account, which forwards to the Verizon, still had all the older emails online but those emails were also gone from the Live Mail inbox.

Now, a few days ago, for a couple of days, my Verizon email had been wonky, sometimes refusing to log into and download from the server. Stuff eventually made it past whatever the problem was, but it interfered with mail on the desktop and both laptops for an annoying while. Then, suddenly, the problem was gone -- and a slew of emails I'd already received came pouring in again on the desktop -- but not, curiously, to the laptops, which use Outlook rather than Live Mail.

Things went along as they should for the next few days -- and now this. Any emails not in the inbox but in other storage folders, even subfolders for the inbox, are still there, no matter how old, and the mail downloaded to Outlook on the laptops is also still in the inbox, but Live Mail inbox? Gone.

So take this as a warning: If you use Live Mail, or perhaps any other cloud-based email service, it might be wise to put anything you want to save for any length of time, even short term, into storage of some kind, just in case.