It seems Gmail decided to take out the garbage - forcibly.

I normally access email thru POP3.
Logged into Gmail webUI today, and imagine my shock when I suddenly found I was using far less space than I remember having used the last time (it'd been 2 months since I logged into web-interface).
The previous time, I had been using like 1200-odd MB of space, out of 2650 MB. And today it showed only 250 MB as "occupied" space.
The first thought was, does mail in "trash" not count towards your mailbox anymore?

But the nightmare was yet to come.
I looked at some new mails in the Inbox, then went to the trash folder..... where I saw.... NOTHING !!!!!!!!!!
WTF ??
It had all my mails that I ever received - right since August 2004. I had left them in there, as Gmail did not seem to empty the trash automatically. Many of the super-ancient mails in there were mails that I'd wanted to look into, at some point in the future. But they decided to empty out a year-and-a-half's worth of treasures without even notifying me about the step! My 32,000 mails - GONE!!!!!


Further blog-postings about this:
Gmail deletes trash
Google does some cleaning with Gmail mailboxes

Does it sound very rude if I say that it is ones own responsibility for backing up his emails?
AFAIK the service is still in betastate so relying on it isn't a wise idea.

A spare harddrive does the job better dan Gmail and a 5 gig harddrive is affordable isn't it? create a image and burn it away and you're save


Doenja

i'm sorry, but in the trash it clearly says

if you wanna save old stuff you're ment to archive it. I prefer it like that personally.

I dont understand becasue i got mail in trash that has been in there more than a year and they never got deleted.

Yup, old mails did not ever get deleted all these days.
And that was the reason I was comfortable with leaving mails in the trash.

computerMan:
Better take a look now, to see whether your old mails in trash have been cleared out too!!

until there is a program that can work as well as the google Webui i dont plan on using pop3.


part of why i love gmail is the webui.

yep the other day i suddenly discovered that my trash didn't stored mails older than 1 month (this didn't happen before).

i'm feeling ok with this since this is supposed to "be what it must be"

btw, 1200mb! good luck pra

wow 1200mb hope u didn't have important stuff in there but come to think about it, u deleted them

i think the reason u deleted them was not to see them in the inbox right?
bc obviously gmail has labels instead of folders and sometimes makes things harder to see. u could put not-so-important mails to low priority folder or something and wouldn't have to load the mails in your inbox..

okay its fancy and good that there are labels but there should be folders too right?

i use outlook and download my email so i never have the issue of leaving stuff in the archive, as a matter of fact when i delete things i delete them from the deleted items via "delete them forever"...

i did clear out my trash so i will fill it up and and wait more than 30.4368499 days and see if they get deleted.

who cares about trash :S

I really don't see the point of putting important mails in the trash.

If you want to keep them why would you put them in the trash??

quite amuzing to be astunisched it realize gooogle finaly did what it was suposed to be doing al along (auto-deleting trash) :rofl:

by the way if im not mistaking there is a thunderbird gmail-like UI extention, so you can use gmail the way gmail looks without loging in through the website.

Even 1/10th that deserves .

I have little to nothing in gmail but I'll check to make sure I've got anything I find critical save to HD. I've used gmail off and on for quite a while now and gotten lulled into complacency with it because it seemed so static or stable and I've basically disregarded the 'beta' status.

DL

I don't think I'd consider this an indicator of the beta's stability, after all, it's a feature that was SUPPOSED to be there, and now they've finally got it working.

When we migrated to Exchange 2003 at work from 5.5, we had a lot of users like Prathapml, with thousands of items in their deleted folders that they wanted to keep. We told them that we'd keep the messages on the old server, but not to expect that they'd remain. "They are deleted, after all," we told them.

Few of them listened

In any case, I'm sorry for your loss, Prathapml. Data loss like that is unpleasant.

I have Gmail, but I don't even use it.

Not to get on a soapbox, but they do warn that emails in trash may be deleted. Even if some messages do stay in there for more than 30 days (I would guess they don't do auto-deletes as long as sufficient server space is available?), I agree with the other posters, the trash just doesn't sound like a safe place to keep messages you want to keep, esspecially since they warn you about auto-deletes.

You said you use POP3, do you have these messages archived anywhere locally (archived by the mail client)?

Nopes

The deleted mails weren't really of the "important" category.
They were more of "probably interesting enough to check out later" kind of stuff.
And also some sent/received mails back from the first day I got Gmail.

Anyways, I guess I'm coming to terms with the fact that those mails are gone.
But the big deal wasn't that the mails got deleted! What I was concerned about, is that atleast they could have sent a notice saying that trash is now going to be cleared out (so that I could archive any of the useful old-time mails), despite its status being "beta".

Sudden decisions, tentacles in every niche, power over millions of people..... Monopoly anyone?

Well I guess its just that you put it in the deleted items folder and it got deleted... funny that

I don't use gmail much, but can't you create a folder and put stuff in that ??

Yeah that's sick in gmail - No folders?
Idea of labels is to find items in that label alone but it doesn't help when you wanna a whole lotta messages of different category to be seen together.