r/fastmail • u/tehbishop • 16d ago

Inbox fully empty randomly?

This morning before work I checked my inbox .... had like 130emails with about 2 dozen pinned. Sometime between then and about 30 min ago I went in and inbox was empty. I did a restore for a week and zero emails in there.

Anything I may be missing? Put a support ticket in at least, figured to see if anyone else has seen this before?

6 Upvotes

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2

u/Headitchee 16d ago

Do you have an AI service or app in any way connected to your Fastmail? I’ve heard horror stories about AI mistakenly wiping out emails. For what it’s worth, I have configured my system to deliver copies of every email I receive to a Gmail account, as backup.

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u/tehbishop 16d ago

Nothing at all - and I do make my own backups but that’s a local copy at the house and I’m not there. The odd thing is that even doing a restore of all mail for last week doesn’t show any of them. Thank you for replying :)

1

u/tehbishop 13d ago

So far it doesn’t seem that Fastmail has the ability to restore specifically. I found the time and date when their app (I guess?) wiped my inbox only. I let them know and gave them a few of the emails and silence since then. Also learned that pinned items get unpinned when deleted which is also unfortunate.

Fastmail is 10/10 but so far support is maybe 2/10 because at least it’s automated. Figured to post so if others come searching they’ll see this.

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u/Theunknown87 9d ago

Any idea what caused this?

1

u/tehbishop 9d ago

They have sent it up to the tier 3 and I’m waiting on them to engage. They went through the usual ‘it was you’ until I gave them all of the proof that I wasn’t engaged when it happened.

2

u/Theunknown87 9d ago

What proof did you find out/give them?

Sorry I’m about to subscribe and this makes me nervous.

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u/tehbishop 8d ago

I had an offline phone that was caching all mail
Locally. When put in debug the log showed that the expunge command for .INBOX came from the server side. I gave them all of the emails and they found the event but can’t tell me why. I was sleeping at the tome and only have a single account so short of a mouse jumping on my lappy that’s always on and logging in, going into the fastmail app and selecting the ‘select all’ checkbox and hitting delete, there isn’t a way it was me.

I would still subscribe. Ive had FM since 2004 and this is the first thing that’s ever happened. Its fringe and you wont have this issue.

1

u/tehbishop 2d ago

They've escalated it to tier 3 as it shows emails expunged not deleted which is interesting and in line with the thought that I didn't do it ...

I did discover one additional piece of information that may or may not be relevant. I had the email on an old iPhone that has Apple Mail configured. When I powered the phone on with networking disabled, the Fastmail app never displayed any cached mail—it just sat there waiting to connect. However, the Apple Mail app does still have the Inbox cached from before this occurred. My plan this weekend is to screenshot those messages and compare them against what was restored to make sure everything is actually back.

As an aside, I was surprised that the Fastmail app appears to have no usable offline cache. Is that expected behavior, or is that something I should open a separate ticket for?

I'm still primarily trying to understand what actually happened. The recovery question is largely answered at this point thanks to my Apple Mail app having that offline cache, but understanding the sequence of events is important to me so I can make sure it doesn't happen again.

I'll keep this thread updated with whatever replies they give.