Samesies, I would love more input. I don't imagine too many of us just let it expire, heck, normally *I* wouldn't!

It just feels pretty disheartening to have it happen to some items that I've been holding on to for SO long, especially when the RNG on some of those leads is utter garbage.

I do the mail-bounce thing for handling treasure maps (which wouldn't be necessary if they would just stack! grumble), and I have sometimes forgotten to bounce them, in which case they expire.

But expired mails have always returned to the original sender (as long as the expired mail is the original sent mail, and not itself a return; an expired return is gone), but there's a delay.

I'm not sure what determines how long that delay is, but it's usually been around a month. But it can be considerably shorter. Or considerably longer. There was one batch of mails that expired and weren't returned a month after expiration. Nothing after two, three months, and at that point I thought that they were gone forever. And then eight months after those mails expired and disappeared, they just all reappeared one day as returned mails in the original sender's mailbox.

Again, I have no idea why this delay before the auto-return can be as short as a couple of days or as much as over half a year. But I'm pretty sure that your mails are not actually gone. And that you'll see them again in about a month. Or two. Or more.

PS5/NA, I have lost 24 West Weald maps the same way. They have never bounced back and no longer shows on the account I mailed them too. Figured they are lost forever. Pretty salty about but figured lesson learned. Really hope they come back as code said.

Stay safe 🙂

code65536 wrote: »

I do the mail-bounce thing for handling treasure maps (which wouldn't be necessary if they would just stack! grumble), and I have sometimes forgotten to bounce them, in which case they expire.

But expired mails have always returned to the original sender (as long as the expired mail is the original sent mail, and not itself a return; an expired return is gone), but there's a delay.

I'm not sure what determines how long that delay is, but it's usually been around a month. But it can be considerably shorter. Or considerably longer. There was one batch of mails that expired and weren't returned a month after expiration. Nothing after two, three months, and at that point I thought that they were gone forever. And then eight months after those mails expired and disappeared, they just all reappeared one day as returned mails in the original sender's mailbox.

Again, I have no idea why this delay before the auto-return can be as short as a couple of days or as much as over half a year. But I'm pretty sure that your mails are not actually gone. And that you'll see them again in about a month. Or two. Or more.

Since I have a lot of maps saved this way for event I'm definitely not going to wait xy months for them to come back from acc 2. So I'd rather do everything manually. But thanks for the info on this. Interesting even strange that it can take so long for mails to return..

PeacefulAnarchy wrote: »

So I've been keeping an eye on this and I have not gotten auto returned mails, moreover, manually returned mails don't keep their expiry date. So if a mail has two days to expire and is returned, its timer is still two days. I'm not 100% sure, but I thought in the past it reset, it certainly did for auto returned mails which had a 30 day expiry upon return.

Concerning change if so. Inconvenient enough for those of us sending things to alts for storage, but I'd hate to send something to someone who doesn't log in often and have it just disappear into the ether. I also wonder what happens with COD mails. If someone keeps a COD mail for 30 days will the item return or just vanish.

You're right, it did previously reset the timer. I wonder if that is what happened to OPs maps. They expired on one account, bounced back to the main account but the timer was up so they were deleted.

Doesn't take into account @code65536 's experience, though, of having them show up over half a year later.

UPDATE: I can't see the exact date that I made my original post, however as of this morning, January 4, 2024, many of my maps have shown up in my inbox.

@code65536 thank you for the glimmers of hope, as they were well founded.

And just yesterday, when I saw the updated roadmap infographic showing the pan tamriel event I was feeling bitter, but as I hardly play ESO past getting my event tickets I was letting it slide. But when I logged on to get tickets this morning... well... my maps are back.

2 months late, but better late than after the event, I suppose.

This remains an issue. I'm responsible for sending out raffle prizes and gifts for our guilds and today I got back 8 mails that were originally sent as far back as *26 weeks ago*.

Millions of gold worth of items sitting in the void for as long as 6 months.

@ZOS_Kevin

Need to keep this thread alive. Because apparently it only takes a few minutes to sent someone a mail, but over 2 years for it to come back if unopened...

Fixing the issue might save some server space somewhere.

I read somewhere (a while ago) that emails between accounts were going to expire and be deleted after 10 days so I never let them go over 10 days before I either claim them or return them. I can relax a bit if I have 30 days.