Customer Wants Refund - Can Old Email Be Recovered?

I have a customer who has just emailed recently wishing for refunds for the past two years to a subscription website, claiming he emailed me and told me he was leaving the site, got charged again (recently), and has been unable to view the site for the last 9 months (thus constituting a refund for the first year).

We usually keep all emails. However, in November we changed our email address for support as the first one was taken over by spam and it could not be helped. All contact forms, member support forms, etc. were updated to address the new email address.

Now that I am looking for any email correspondences received from the customer before November, I cannot find them as I suppose I deleted the mail account and all email went with it (through Plesk). Is there any way to recover the emails?

I simply feel I am being taken advantage of, although I am not sure if there is anything I can do about it. I cannot risk legal action at this point (which he threatens), but his claims for refunds are poor.

His membership on the site is still active - I just checked. He should have no problem logging in unless he forgot his password, in which case he can recover it. Furthermore, we never received any emails from him stating that his membership was not working, until now, nearly a year later. I hate to have to provide a refund for the first year.

The second year I do not mind refunding as it hasn't been a terrible amount of time - it has been about a month and a half. Perhaps he just received his card statement recently and looked over it and wants a refund. He states he emailed and canceled the subscription, although this is not true as the subscription is managed through Paypal and still active. However, most of this (except for recent stuff) would have been under our old email address that is deleted.

By the time I get a response to this, I imagine I will have already refunded him for both years although I do not wish to. However, anything I can learn about this for future issues would be greatly appreciated.

As far as I know, there's not a way to pull up old email from an account that no longer exists, unless the system was set to backup the email.

As for users cancelling membership. Do you have any sort of verification system in place that will send them an email or something when they cancel? If so, then ask the user to send you a copy of the email they received when cancelling. If you don't have one set up, then now's a good time to set one up.

I would say that if you have no problem refunding the 2nd year, then try to compromise with the user...

Thanks for the response. I have refunded the second payment but provided reasons there is not justification for the first year.

As for emails, I do not have that set up. I will look into it, although I will need to configure it for both authorize.net and Paypal as both are accepted, although each have their own files and scripts, tables, etc.. When I have more time in the future I would love to make everything more 'standard' and redo the code now that I know a lot more about php, but I am not sure when that will happen. It's just a lot more work to go in and make all the manual changes to the separate files at this point.

Anyways, I will look into that. I'm not sure if authorize.net sends information for canceled subscriptions (it is set to email transaction receipt if email provided, but documentation on ARB is scarce and most everything applies to AIM integration). I'm not sure about Paypal either - I automatically get a notification when the subscription is canceled, but I'm not sure if the subscriber gets one as well.