You bought a new computer. You got it home, turned it on, opened your mail, and the inbox is empty. Or worse, it has the last two weeks in it and nothing from the eleven years before that.

I got this call last week: a customer who was certain twenty years of mail had just evaporated.

It almost never has. But where it went depends entirely on one thing.

Your mail lives in one of two places

Either your email lives on the mail company's computers, or it lives in a program on your old machine.

That's the whole thing. Everything else follows from it.

If your mail lives on the company's computers, at Gmail or Outlook.com or your internet provider, then your new machine isn't holding your mail. It's just a window looking at it. Sign in on the new one and everything comes back. Nothing was ever on the old computer to begin with.

If your mail lives in a program on the old machine, it's a different story. The program pulled each message down off the server, saved it to that hard drive, and in a lot of cases deleted the server copy on the way. Your mail is a file on a computer sitting in your basement. Signing in on the new machine won't find it, because there's nothing left on the server to find.

Same email address. Same password. Completely different situation.

How to tell which one you have

If you've always read your mail in a web browser by going to gmail.com or similar, you're on the server side. Sign in and you're done.

If you opened a program to get your mail, something like Outlook or Thunderbird or Windows Mail or Apple Mail, you could be either one. The program is just the window. What matters is how it was set up years ago, and almost nobody remembers.

Here's the practical test. On the old computer, open the mail program and look at a message from four years ago. Then go to a phone or a browser, sign in to the same account, and look for that same message. If it's there, your mail is on the server and you're fine. If the browser only shows recent mail, or nothing, then the old computer is holding the only copy.

If the old computer holds the only copy

Don't wipe it. Don't sell it. Don't drop it at the recycling center.

The mail is recoverable. It's a file, it can be exported, and it can be brought into the new machine. But it has to happen while the old drive still exists and still spins.

This is the part that turns a twenty minute job into a bad afternoon. People set up the new computer, decide the old one is dead weight, and clear it out. Then a month later they go looking for a receipt or a message from someone who's passed away, and it's gone. Not misplaced. Gone.

If the drive is wiped, there's sometimes still a path through data recovery, and sometimes there isn't. It's not a call I like making.

What to do today

If you're about to switch machines, check before you switch. Ten minutes now.

If you already switched and the old one is still in the closet, you're in good shape. Leave it alone and let's look at it.

If you already switched and the mail is all there, nothing to do. You were on the server side.

Your email address is also the key to nearly every other account you own, which is a bigger deal than most people realize. See Why Email Is the Master Key. And if you're sorting out what actually lives where, Cloud Sync Explained and How to Back Up Your Computer cover the rest.

If the old computer is still around and you're not sure what you have, don't wipe it yet. Book a remote session and we'll check first.

Mike
PCRescue | Portland, ME