[pradeepjey]

Hi Folks,

In advance, apologies if this is the wrong place to post this.



I called my carrier and they suggested I place it on the Blackberry Support forums, I thought the CB community might be able to give me more advice on what to do / who to get hold of at Blackberry.

Here's the story:



I upgraded from a 9900 to a lovely Q10 on UK carrier EE on Thursday 16th.

My e-mail was setup as IMAP on the Q10 and was also setup as IMAP before that on BIS for my 9900.

On the e-mail side of things everything setup fine and was working well on the Q10.

Then on Sunday 19th at just after 7pm UK time a whole load of mail disappeared from the server. Pretty much everything from April 18th to May 18th from the inbox and all sub-folders including sent items. I contacted my e-mail provider and they said there was POP access to my e-mail account at that time from an US IP registerd to Blackberry.

Presumably, given the timing, during that POP access the missing e-mails were downloaded from the server. But they're not on my phone.

So, here's my confusion / questions:

1) I thought that with the Q10 all data traffic went through my carrier and not through Blackberry' s servers?

2) Even if it does go through a Blackberry server, why would there suddenly be POP access when I was setup and running as IMAP?

3) Where on earth is my missing e-mail and how can I get it back?

My e-mail is both for work and personal use so losing that much is a massive work headache and of course the fact that so much information has gone to I-don't-know-where is a massive privacy / security concern.


Any advice you can give would be greatly appreciated.

Below is the info I got from my e-mail provider and from whatsmyipaddress.com


We only log the most recent POP connection:2013-05-19 11:06:44 from IP 68.171.232.33 - The time was Pacific US time.General IP Information
IP: 68.171.232.33
Decimal:1152116769
Hostname:bbcs.blackberry.net
ISP:Research In Motion
Organization: Research In Motion

Geolocation Information
Country:United States
Latitude:38 (38� 0′ 0.00″ N)
Longitude:-97 (97� 0′ 0.00″ W)

[Omnitech]

Nom Nom Nom Nom GULP. MMmm, that was good.


All kidding aside...

The Blackberry 10 devices, by default, with OS 10.0.0, display only 30 days of email history. Even for POP mail accounts. So if emails are older than that, they will disappear from the hub view.

(This has changed with OS 10.1 and the Q10, which at minimum has OS 10.1 on it. If the account is setup as Exchange ActiveSync, it will retain history indefinitely if you select the "forever" option when setting up the account. If an account is setup as IMAP, it will retain it depending on what you select on setup, up to 90 days.)

That does NOT necessarily mean they are not on the server. In a syncing email system, it just means that you are no longer syncing those older messages to the handheld device.

What is unusual is that even the accounts configured as POP do that. BUT: Blackberry does NOT delete messages simply because the "view" of older messages on the device doesn't show them. For POP, the default is to retrieve and "leave on server". You have to explicitly choose to delete a message before it will delete it from your email server.

[Omnitech]

My guess about what happened in your case is that you still have your legacy Blackberry account active and the old BIS system linked to your 9900 pulled those messages off there for some reason.

Have you looked on the 9900 for the messages?

Another possibility is someone else has the password for either your email server, or one of your Blackberries, or did something on one of them when you left it unattended.

[Omnitech]

For what it's worth, bbcs.blackberry.net appears to be part of "Blackberry Business Cloud Services". I don't know much about it, here are some details I found:

ExchangeGeek: Securing Exchange Online BlackBerry Devices with BlackBerry Business Cloud Service and Blocking BlackBerry Internet Service

[pradeepjey]

Hi OmniTech,

Thanks for your swift replies, much appreciated.

My 9900 didn't have the messages on and in fact was wiped ready to be sent off second hand sale (I sent it yesterday). When it was setup it was setup for IMAP access.

At first I thought this was a weird glitch - I am more and more concerned that this was done as some kind of data theft.

I don't use the BB Business Cloud Services - never have - has some one who does downloaded my e-mail?

I guess the next thing to do would be to post in BBCS's forum but given the lack of response to my other post I'm not holding out much hope.

Any advice on actually getting hold of someone there?

[Omnitech]

I don't use the BB Business Cloud Services - never have - has some one who does downloaded my e-mail?

I guess the next thing to do would be to post in BBCS's forum but given the lack of response to my other post I'm not holding out much hope.

Any advice on actually getting hold of someone there?

Sorry I don't have any contact info for that service but I can give you a number for Blackberry Support in Canada - this number may only work from North America:

877-255-2377

[pradeepjey]

I'll give it a shot. Thanks.

[Omnitech]

pradeepjey: I just found some other discussion threads here about what may be the same issue:

http://forums.crackberry.com/blackbe...emails-774335/
http://forums.crackberry.com/blackbe...period-799867/

[Pete The Penguin]

I'll give it a shot. Thanks.

I've the support number for BlackBerry UK, see attached:

Attachment 164941

Posted via CB10 from my Q10.

[pradeepjey]

Thanks Guys. Sorry for the late reply. It looks like it was some issue with the BIS system from my 9900 as my e-mail provider found the IP in question regularly accessed the account prior to me getting my Q10.

It happened again at the weekend - another 30 days worth of mail vanished including sent my but mail older than 30 days stayed put. My mobile carrier is escalating it to BB as I just kept getting put on hold for ages when I tried them.

Somewhat relieved that it looks like it wasn't a data theft but losing that much mail twice is a massive hassle.

[robsteve]

Thanks Guys. Sorry for the late reply. It looks like it was some issue with the BIS system from my 9900 as my e-mail provider found the IP in question regularly accessed the account prior to me getting my Q10.

It happened again at the weekend - another 30 days worth of mail vanished including sent my but mail older than 30 days stayed put. My mobile carrier is escalating it to BB as I just kept getting put on hold for ages when I tried them.

Somewhat relieved that it looks like it wasn't a data theft but losing that much mail twice is a massive hassle.

If you still have your old 9900, try connecting it to the network and doing a security wipe. In addition, if you are using BlackBerry Protect, you can go into that and delete it as a device, but I don't know if that will do anything.

I once had an old Blackberry that started getting the old owners blackberry.net emails when I activated it, even after a security wipe. I just had to call the carrier, give them the PIN and the email address and they deleted the account from the BIS.

[abraca]

These sound similar to my issue. My zed is deleting mail from 3 accounts (only 1 google) after 1 week. It's wiped from the device and server. Even if I attempt to save in a folder, it's wiped. Since there's no setting to control length of time left, I'm at a loss. Tweeted BB help. Was told it should only delete after 30 days. Nope. Mine wipes after 1 week. Still have my 9900. If I don't solve it soon will be forced to use the 9900 as it's wiping business mail, etc

[Omnitech]

These sound similar to my issue. My zed is deleting mail from 3 accounts (only 1 google) after 1 week. It's wiped from the device and server. Even if I attempt to save in a folder, it's wiped. Since there's no setting to control length of time left, I'm at a loss. Tweeted BB help. Was told it should only delete after 30 days. Nope. Mine wipes after 1 week. Still have my 9900. If I don't solve it soon will be forced to use the 9900 as it's wiping business mail, etc

The device should NEVER automatically delete ANYTHING from the server without a user initiated request.

The 30-day (or whatever length) retention time limit only applies to messages visible on the DEVICE, not the server.

[Scaevola]

Could it be imap settings on the server?


Side question: is the only way to get forever sync (and full universe search) to add the account as a activesync? So gmail no longer does it?

Posted via CB10

[Omnitech]

Could it be imap settings on the server?

No. I repeat - There is NO reason why the device should EVER send a "delete" or "move" command to the server unless the user of the device specifically deletes messages in the device's email client. (ie Blackberry Hub in this case)

On a syncing email system, the amount of time that the device retains LOCAL copies of emails has NOTHING to do with sending "delete" commands to the server. It should just drop the local copies after they reach a certain age. It already has each message's date/timestamp and its own internal clock, it should just remove local copies after they reach a certain age, there is no need to even communicate with the server to do that.

Even if it did communicate with the server (ie to issue a new "sync last 30 days" command), nothing in that exchange should involve deleting ANYTHING on the server unless the user actually requested message deletion.

Side question: is the only way to get forever sync (and full universe search) to add the account as a activesync? So gmail no longer does it?

Gmail never did "forever sync" on Blackberry 10. It did on the legacy Blackberry devices, because Blackberry wrote a proprietary Gmail "plugin" to BIS to support those features.

It seems that Blackberry is moving away from writing various proprietary email features into BB10, I can understand their position on that.

Gmail can support "forever sync" if you use the commercial (paid) version and set it up as EAS, and even when using IMAP it now should go back 90 days.

Longer email retention for IMAP email providers is scheduled to be made available later this year in a BB10 update. As for remote search, I don't know if Gmail supports that over IMAP but if they do, I could see Blackberry adding that functionality later.

More info:

http://forums.crackberry.com/blackbe...yncing-777774/

[pradeepjey]

Well now it's happened 3 times since I've had the device - A deletion of about 30 days of e-mail (including sub-folders) from the server of whatever e-mail address is associated with the device (before the third time it happened I'd changed my e-mail account).

The third time text messages and Facebook messages were also deleted so I'm assuming it's some weird bug with the delete function.

As it happens my carrier pushed an OS update (10.1.0.2342) just after the third time (about a month ago now) and it hasn't happened since.

Abraca - I hope it gets sorted for you.

[Omnitech]

Well now it's happened 3 times since I've had the device - A deletion of about 30 days of e-mail (including sub-folders) from the server of whatever e-mail address is associated with the device (before the third time it happened I'd changed my e-mail account).

The third time text messages and Facebook messages were also deleted so I'm assuming it's some weird bug with the delete function.

As it happens my carrier pushed an OS update (10.1.0.2342) just after the third time (about a month ago now) and it hasn't happened since.

Abraca - I hope it gets sorted for you.

Glad you're still following this.

There has been a raging discussion about this issue over on the official BlackBerry forums, I keep getting notifications of new posts in threads about it there but I just haven't had time to go over there and read them.

It wouldn't surprise me if it was a bug, or perhaps in some cases people mistakenly hitting "delete prior", but something else that complicates it is that recent OS 10.1 builds have eliminated the 30-day sync limit for IMAP and 30-day display limit for POP3 accounts (in addition to the 30-day sync limit for Exchange ActiveSync [EAS] accounts a couple of months back), so if it has something to do with the sync period that may change with new builds depending. (ie with IMAP you would have to delete and re-create an account to reset the "Initial retrieval amount", since unlike EAS, in BB10 there is no "sync timeframe" setting)

[Vaibhav Arora]

Same here, it happened twice, once after os update, deleted everything from hub, logs, SMS, everything

Posted via CB10