Will I lose my email if I don't check it for a while?
Hi, everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com.
Let's get right to this question.
I just moved and was not able to check my email for three to four weeks.
Will I still receive emails sent in that time period?
So the answer to your question is yeah,
probably. The answer to the article question.
Will I lose my email if I don't check it for a while?
Is a yes, depending on "a while."
Let's look at that in a little bit more detail.
Like I said, you, in your case for being
away from your email for three to four weeks, we'll probably get all the email
that was sent to you while you were away.
A few weeks really isn't that big a deal.
It's months that we need to worry about.
If you don't check your email for multiple months, then the email service provider
may decide that you've abandoned the account, that the account is inactive.
If they decide to do that, if they decide to make that assumption,
then they could in turn delete everything in the account.
They could close the account so you can't even log into it anymore.
And in the worst case, they can actually make the email address
associated with that account available to new users.
Now, of course, the question is, how long is a while?
How quickly are they going to do that?
How long do I have the answer is it depends.
It depends on your provider.
Some will do it in six months.
Some will do it in twelve months.
Some will do it in 24 months.
Some seem to never do it at all.
So it's incredibly important that you
understand what that number is or log into your account every once in a while.
Set yourself a reminder for once a month.
Just go make sure you can log into that account.
There's nothing there that you needed to see it's quick.
It's easy, and it keeps the account alive.
You can also do this with a POP3 email program.
In most cases, if you've got a desktop
email program running that is checking for new mail periodically
on all of your accounts, make sure that this account is part of it.
That's really the only way to make sure that that account doesn't go away.
And those three steps that I mentioned deleting your information,
locking your account and then reusing the email address.
Those could happen all at once,
or those could happen at different times, depending on again, the email provider
different email providers do it in different ways,
but this is almost always with respect to several months of inactivity
is one scenario that could potentially
bite you during a vacation where we're talking about a few weeks away from your
email account, and that is your email quota.
Some email providers have a limit of how much email they will keep in your account
before they start bouncing it back to the sender that's referred to as a quota.
If you get a lot of email and your email provider has a Leo ish
quota in comparison to the email you get, then, yes, it is possible that at some
point while you are away, email sent to you could start bouncing.
The only way that I'm aware of to make
sure that that doesn't happen is basically the same solution as before.
Log into your email account every so
often, or have your desktop email program download your email.
Just do something so that the email doesn't accumulate to the point where
a subsequent email sent to you starts bouncing.
Understanding how quickly you get email, how much email you get over the course
of these several weeks and how that relates to your email providers.
Quota is what really tells you how important this is.
As an example, gmail, I believe, gives you 15GB of storage to start with.
If you bump up to 15GB, yeah, they'll stop accepting email for you,
but most of us have nowhere near 15GB of email in our account,
and we're perfectly safe to ignore it for a few weeks.
Small providers, ISPs they often have
a much smaller quota, a much smaller number to be concerned
about, and it's something to be aware of while you're away.
So I hope that helps a little bit
understand exactly what to expect when your email account may or may not start
rejecting email or potentially even go away completely.
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2606 I'm Leo Notenboom. This is
askleo.com.