Not knowing how Sky email was set up, in particular for those experiencing problems, it's difficult to make a more detailed comment. It is not inevitable that downloading and deleting emails from a mail server results in their deletion on the server. Client settings may affect this.

Agreed. Who knows how long Google keep backups for (should we berate them if it's a long time?) or what Yahoo requested. All available backups? That would make sense.

"Delete" hardly ever means "delete" on a computer! On an email system it usually means "delete from this client". I would be in a right mess if deleting an email from one client meant it was deleted from all of my mail clients and from the mail servers.

How would you migrate mailboxes (without destroying existing ones mid-migration)? Having dealt with exactly this situation (server to server rather than between ISPs) I used existing backups.

Not only the easiest, but the most secure. You can set up the new mailbox, and ensure it is working, whilst the old one is still functioning. Then you do a much smaller, and quicker, migration of any new emails since that process.

You don't do a migration of this sort with a "big bang" approach (not if you expect to still have a job next week).

In reply to a post by AEP:

You can set up the new mailbox, and ensure it is working, whilst the old one is still functioning.

That's the theory, it seems that someone forgot about the bit I've italicised

In reply to a post by Lethe:

And surely *delete* means delete.

The Internet is all going to pot IMHO.

Nick

Not really, looking at most email clients (outlook, thunderbird etc) the delete folder needs to emptied either manually or automatically.

As for the whole issue of "thousands" of emails people don't seem to realise how many emails they get as they can be collected several times a day.

I keep a 30 day cache of my pop box just in case I need to roll back my windows install and in there there is over 1000 mails,

If somebody has been using IMAP or not configured their POP box correctly I would expect somebody to get tens of thousands of mails in their delete folder.

Is Google really charging that much more than Yahoo for Sky to want to make the move as it is the 2nd time they have moved their mail service since they started,

In reply to a post by Lethe:

And surely *delete* means delete.

The Internet is all going to pot IMHO.

Nick

Not in Google's dictionary. To them it means that the user does not want to see it , but is willing to let Google own it and do what they will with the content.

Or you set up new accounts and give users the option to move stuff across or not.

Or don't import the old emails into plain Inbox, but a legacy folder.

depends on what they mean by "deleted" - Gmail has a "Bin" that emails you delete from web or IMAP go into, haven't tried POP3 and don't know if Sky's implementation was the same as full Gmail.

in:trash in the search box of Gmail shows them up - if I was asked to transfer all email from an account to a new provider I would send everything including the trash / bin / deleted items - I've been burned before by end users "storing" things in the trash.