Anyone know of another way to get expired mail back? Long story short, I was in a bad vehicle accident and hospitalized for several weeks and recovery for several more weeks. I run multiple characters for AH in the thousands of listings, as well as transfers between characters for material, gold, etc. I was out for about 2 months, logged in, expecting there to be no mail since there is a 30 day expiration but fully expecting there to be a restore function since it hasn’t been that long on the expiration and my account status has remained active, no reason to purge the system of my items on a paid for account. Welp, no luck, no items on any characters have any mail that can be restored. Now I’m talking low in 20 million server price worth of auctions high end 100s of millions if everything sold beyond current value. Some items aren’t even in the game anymore since a lot of my characters have been created since WoW birth. Need help, recovery doesn’t work, tickets on the main two characters already placed and at this point the outcome to this determines rather or not I’ll ever play this game again. I get it boohoo life sucks, well, i expect that a life altering vehicle crash to be some of the worst to happen in the last months but to have hundreds, if not thousands of hrs worth of items gone is beyond that. Please, any GM that can look into this would greatly be appreciated.
I realy dont think anything can be done mail never been meant to be used as a extra bank logs only go back weeks not months. If im wrong im sure ill be corrected butt if the system cant find the mail a GM wont either.
Unfortunately, there are no GMs on the forums. If you submitted a ticket, that’s the proper way to go about this. https://us.battle.net/support/en/help/wf/wow/463/1674/submitted would be the proper path. At the end, if it couldn’t find any mail to recover, it will give you the opportunity to submit a ticket.
However, mail only stays in the mailbox for 30 days, and then is permanently deleted 30 days after that. The logs are pretty finite for mail, so just setting the proper expectations. A GM might not be able to restore the mail either.
Yeah, I was afraid of that. Figured it was best to ask, I know a friend of mine said they had taken a year away from the game and came back and had over 1k+ items restored. Also, looking on forums it seemed that some people had the same issues as I and a Gm would respond saying there was nothing they could do and they’d file another ticket and another GM would actually manage to do something. So, figured I’d ask and see what others were able to do and see the process, if anything, actually worked. Thanks all for your responses thus far.
Not really, Menamon. The mail recovery page, much like Item Restoration, uses the same data that a Game Master would. If the mail doesn’t appear there it has likely already been purged and cannot be recovered.
I took the liberty of checking your characters and can confirm, you do not have any deleted mail available. Sorry.
Technically it’s not so much they want to erase your efforts without consideration, but rather that in terms of storage which is finite, it’s not always feasible for them to keep it. I’m sorry to hear this is a deal breaker, but it was always explained that mail was not to be used as a permanent storage system.
I am sorry to hear that, Menarot, although I wouldn’t really say that the game so easily erases anything. Auction House mail remains for a full 30 days after it returns to the player.
Obviously, you had some very specific and unfortunate circumstances that kept you away, but storage for anything is not infinite and the agency in handling character inventory tends to remain in the player’s hands and a 30 day decay time tends to be pretty standard throughout gaming.
Good luck to you.
I’m sorry to hear about your accident but I’m glad to hear you’re doing better these days.
Maybe you can treat it as a new challenge – to rebuild your empire as part of your healing process?
HaHa appreciate the kind words and I’m trying to look for any positive spin I can to maintain but knowing the amount of work I’ve put into this account over a decade+ (granted I did take an extended break from end of MoP to end of Shadowland because of deployments and injury recoveries and such, only reason for my return is old friends said DF was going to be like the good ole days of WotLK) While I have enjoyed the xpac and hanging with old friends again and making some new ones, I don’t know if I can get past this hurdle. Like I stated, I get allocating resources but one would think some sort of failsafe would be in the code to check for specifics to prevent outliers such as my case from coming to be. Wouldn’t be too hard to have before deletion a couple checks apply
- Is the account active? if so continue to step 2, if not then refer to A.) inactive greater than 30 days, if so delete B.) if inactive account less than 30 days then keep items in mail for addition 30 days or until inactive account surpasses the 60 day mark.
- Has he logged on in the last 30 days, if not, extend 30 past the expiration of mail, this can repeat up to a total of 90 days of mail being in the inbox status to include the original 30, beyond 90, mail gets deleted.
Thanks all and good luck
Sounds like suggestions to the developers. Unfortunately, the developers don’t get suggestions posted in this forum.
As i stated before the mail box is a extremly bad back up bank for this very reason blizzard cant keep the logs for millions of players its just not feasable thats why blizzard introduced regent tab and void storage so players would stop using the mail box as a backup. I get it you had rl issues but its no blizzards fault you didnt use proper storage.
You keep accusing him of using the mail as bank or storage when he clearly stated that he was playing the game regularly and was in a car accident. Nothing to do with using it as a bank or storage.
Sorry to hear about the accident and the loss of the mail OP. Whether you continue to play the game or not I wish you well.
I assumed he was from this line if im wrong then im wrong and it does happen.
Some items aren’t even in the game anymore since a lot of my characters have been created since WoW birth.
But this is becoming circular and this is coming back to ultimately the issue with storage and bandwidth.
This is not an attempt to change your mind, but if they did this for you they’d have to do it for every player because they aren’t prescient and don’t have the ability to pick and choose which players to enable such preparation for. Which then runs quickly into corruptive territory when in a matter of months that failsafe literally cannot be contained or stored anywhere.
If you’ve got any tricks up your sleeve regarding infinite database storage and the finances to cover it, I’m sure they’d be all ears.
The failsafe is, I’m afraid, that thirty day period. Clearly it isn’t long enough for all situations, but there always will be edge cases. 
Just to touch on this: Blizzard made an exception for folks in the military (and the like) units because, within reason, they may not be able to recover stuff on their own after years of not playing. They won’t do the same folks any random event because the person felt like they should get it.
It could be system logs 17 years ago were able to go back further, or there was some extraordinary circumstances that separated your concern with a fringe case from antiquity. We can’t speak in things you might have discovered in a archived search as we don’t know the details. We, your fellow players, can only reinforce the current policy.