I Am Missing Important Messages. Why?

Missing messages are usually messages that have been processed by an Auto Clean rule, by the Unsubscriber, or via Sender Settings. This can happen when you create overly broad rules like "Archive all messages in the Social Notification folder”, “Delete all Notification messages”, or Remove all Unread messages", (just to name a few examples of rules we have seen over time).

Unfortunately, the Clean Email software does not “know” which messages are important for you and which are not, it only performs actions exactly as you have instructed it.

Although most of the time social notifications are useless, there may be cases when they are not. The same applies to online shopping messages. Most notification messages are useless, but they can also be bank notifications or other messages that you may actually want to receive. Likewise, even though there may be situations in which someone would want to remove all unread messages, most of the time that is not something you want to do.

The same concept applies to Unsubscriber rules. A sender like "name@somesender.com" may send mostly useless messages, but might occasionally send important ones.

Resolving Missing Messages

If you find that you are missing messages that may have been removed by Clean Email, please check the Trash folder. You may be able to recover the messages from there.

If you have emptied the trash and the missing messages are no longer in the Trash folder, you may still be able to recover the messages with assistance from your email provider’s support team.

Preventing Future Occurrences

There are a few ways to prevent this kind of issue:

• Delete any automated rules that are too broad (e.g., ones applied to whole folders/labels) and instead create rules based on sender or subject. Check out Sender Settings for tips on how to do this.
• Unblock senders that you have noticed are also sending useful messages (for example, a sender like "no-reply@mybank.com" can also send useful messages in addition to things like newsletters). If you used the Unsubscriber, you will also need to contact the sender to resubscribe to their messages, since the Unsubscriber will have unsubscribed your email address from those messages.
• Make a list of sender addresses or domains that you know send useful messages and pin those addresses in Pinned Messages. That way, even if you have created an automated rule that would potentially apply to those senders, Clean Email will not apply the rule to senders in the pinned list.
  
  For example, suppose you have created a rule to remove all messages in the Social notifications Smart Folder. If a sender whose messages sometimes appear there also occasionally sends messages that you want to receive, pinning the sender’s email address will preserve the sender’s messages so you can read them.

Do you have more questions?

Please contact us and we will be happy to help.