Missing Stored Emails

I had some stuff stored in my email, and now all emails but one is gone. Anyone else get this problem?

P.S. In jogging my memory of when the last time I saw the emails in question, I believe it was before the recent resolution and window scaling change I made. Possibly related (if this is an unknown issue)?

WARNING: I bold names.

I logged in tonight and have the same thing happen to me! I had 9 emails: 1 had cash money influence, the remainders were recipes or enhancements, and all mailed to myself. All but the influence email are gone. In addition, the enhancements I had sitting in my enhancement tray also disappeared. Salvage is ok, however.

And no resolution or scaling adjustment by me, Daemodand. I think (hope?) it's server/system strangeness.

I lost two emails mysteriously myself. One had no attachment, one held some influence. Both were at the top of the list at the time they were lost. No resolution change, although frequent window scaling is necessary for me to read any email and claim any attachments. A friend lost a Kinetic Combat Dam/End this way and was dismissed by support.

i lost 2 emails each with 999,999,999 influence...... no on will get back to me on it

Someone from my SG told us yesterday about the recent loss of several eMails with HOs attached.

Last time we had problems with vanishing ingame eMails it was either the "double quote bug" that was fixed (well, lets say it's supposed to be fixed) or a problem tied to global chat that I think was not fixed. It seems ingame eMails are lost, when global chat dies. Here's a thread from 05-02-2010 discussing this: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=220122 (this is the most recent thread about lost eMails that I could find).

OK I was thinking the problem may have been "unique" to me but I see it's rather common (though surprisingly little discussed).

Note to self: don't use email for storage. Send and immediately retrieve. Never send anything you're not willing to lose.

WARNING: I bold names.

If you send something then immediately switch to the character you want to give it to and claim it. There is a problem where any time that global channels crash every email with attachments gets dumped.

I am missing some of my emails w/ attachments, but not all.

The ones I sent to myself w/ salvage attached have disappeared. The one sent by someone else w/ just inf attached remains.

For those that are missing attachments from emails:

-- Are these emails that you sent to yourself?
-- Are the emails 30 days old?
-- Do you have a full mail box (20 pieces of mail)?

Two emails with 1 million influence attached (each) disappeared. I filled out a Support request, got an email reply indicating the request is escalated; waiting for further response.

-- Are these emails that you sent to yourself? Yes.
-- Are the emails 30 days old? Could be, don't remember.
-- Do you have a full mail box (20 pieces of mail)? No.

If emails expire after 30 days, it would have been nice to know before I attached 1 million influence thinking it would be available for use in the indeterminant future.

This explains why I lost a few mil worth of recipes shortly after I17 launched. Just glad I didn't email purples lol.

In short, don't depend on email to store your items. I do that in WoW and its never been a problem. CoX though I don't trust the system and use it to xfer items/inf as a last resort only.

-- Are these emails that you sent to yourself?

Yes, all sent to my own global.

-- Are the emails 30 days old?

As I recall, yes. They were in there for quite a while.

-- Do you have a full mail box (20 pieces of mail)?

It was full or nearly so.

WARNING: I bold names.

Actually, it's perfectly logical to assume that if you are allowed to email attachments, those attachments will generally stay put and not randomly disappear. So using the system for storage is perfectly logical. However, the problem with logic is it can only account for the known. The "disappearing after 30 days" thing, most likely a bug, was a complete X factor.

So in using email for storage we were not using the system contrary to its design, but using it according to its design. Only a bug acted as an unknown variable and tripped us up, through no fault of our own.

We should probably change the name of I17 to Issue 17: Inf' Sink.

WARNING: I bold names.

I was giving the devs the benefit of the doubt in calling this a bug. Turns out it's a feature. An undocumented feature. Nice. And by "nice" I mean "not nice".

Might be time for that extended break I've been needing. I've got a lot to think about here.

WARNING: I bold names.

Well, sent in the petition yesterday around dinner time about the stuff lost in email, and had a "we found it" reply received back to me after lunch today. Everything is there, despite my vague recollections of what was missing and when.

Happy about the way this was (not) explained by the Dev side? No. Happy about how Customer Support made it right quickly? Yes.

This whole thing has made me unhappy about CoH again, on several levels.

Why is this a feature of email in the first place? Emails don't expire, although lord knows I'd love for spam email to. I can't be the only one who ever had to delete thousands of spam emails (and I mean in-game) with a UI that skipped every other item in the inbox. Even if it's not "technically" email, no email I've ever gotten in the history of this game ever deleted itself. Until, of course, now. Now that there's a more practical feature.

The game doesn't even suffer from the problems of attachments that real email servers do. Real email attachments are giant resource hogs, holding literally thousands or millions of times more information than the simple text messages they're attached to. In-game, attachments should be negligible (a GUID, maybe type info?) - less space than most in-game spam mail text.

Why was expiring emails never mentioned in the i17 preview information?

What does the preview information say? "Mail with attachments cannot be deleted until the attachment is claimed." If I can't delete an email, why should the game?

And then we get that snippy announcement all of a sudden after the first 30 days, like some cranky aunt slapping our hands for something *we* did wrong. I found that fairly offensive. Yes I was "sending emails all over the place" and yes, "this has been an obvious benefit right from the start" - that's *exactly* why it was implemented in the first place. If you implemented expiring emails as the reason for any change to the email system, and decided to toss us a bone by allowing attachments, maybe that should have been stated as the point long before i17 ever went live. Otherwise don't blame us when you coincidentally ruin the benefit of any new feature by adding ridiculous constraints. Has balancing the game come down to UI features, too?

Hopefully the poor support staff can stay on top of this ridiculous event.

I just realized something... It's apparently only emails WITH attachments that expire. I had several characters that had dozens and dozens of emails dating back almost a year, and I had to delete those by hand after i17 came out, some as recently as last week.

What the hell is expiring attachments all about? That's gotta be the lamest thing I've ever heard about in this game, and that includes all the presumably inadvertent mistakes that have been made over the years.

Is it the storage that's a problem? Considering how much spam email was sent and received in MORE THAN TWO YEARS before attachments went live I do not believe that's the case. Spam that never has and apparently never will be automatically deleted.

Trying to keep items moving in the economy? 11 servers, 12 character slots, 10 spots in the ENH tray... I already have the ability to "store" 1320 enhancements. That does not count the minimum of 1 space in wentworths (or the max of what, 29?) and does not count base storage. A couple hundred thousand prestige would get me a couple hundred storage slots, I bet. 20 attachments in email is negligible in comparison.

Support isn't making this a minor issue to deal with.

They keep asking questions that were explicitly answered in the original /petition.

They've replaced the missing items with Enhancements to account for the items attached to mails in my global inbox that expired after they were 30 days old. Enhancements that are NOT my Origin and so far above my level that all I can do is sell them. That is NOT replacing the items that were deleted, it's just being too lazy to check the database backups and logs to see what was actually deleted and replace it. I realize they are likely swamped due to this enormous mistake in deleting emails without informing us PRIOR to the deletions that there was a time limit, but that's no excuse for not replacing what was deleted with the items that were deleted.

It certainly didn't help my attitude much when the GM "suggested" in the response that I not try to use the email system as storage. If he'd read the initial /petition he'd have known that wasn't the case, but I guess he's following the pattern of the previous GM's that responded by asking questions already answered in the /petition.

On top of that, they made some type of mistake and had to log in to my character to correct it, so they reset my password. Now I've had to change the password that I've used for 6 years since it doesn't follow the current password requirements. It's been valid for all this time, but now it's not valid? Thanks, that won't cause me any hassles trying to log in to an account that's been active since before the game launched.

As SoyLeyenda pointed out the announcement was ... well ... not well worded. It implied we'd been doing something wrong instead of admitting that they made an error by not informing us of the 30-day time limit in advance and another error by deleting the emails and attachments without any notice. Oddly enough, if the email doesn't have an attachment it will apparently stay there until you delete it, so it isn't just that all emails are deleted, only those with attachments. I've spoken to several players that still have year old spam in their mailbox that hasn't been deleted. Nice "feature" they added here. As for the wording of the announcement, I too found it a bit offensive in that it implied we did something wrong. The current OCR team seems more interested in putting effort into their forum games of Word Search and photo captions than in effectively communicating with the players. Effective communications involve making sure that your "announcements" don't sound like you are blaming the players for doing something wrong because the OCR team or the Devs forgot to tell anyone there was a time limit until after items were deleted.

I've been a staunch supporter of the game since before the redesign, and have been categorized as a fanboi by some. I still love the game and the players, but the support team, the Dev team and the OCR team have seriously dropped the ball on this one. I guess it's to their benefit that my account is paid through September and Going Rogue is already pre-purchased.