Friday, August 17, 2007

Gmail's Mystery Missing Mails?

Keep a sharp eye on your Gmail. I recently grew suspicious that an email had mysteriously disappeared from my Gmail. I tried everything to find it - searches, All Mail, Spam, Trash. Nope. It was gone. At the time, I put it down to my own tired, hurried, inadvertant use of keyboard shortcuts in Gmail, or just accidentally deleting a message thread.

However, this morning, a colleague of mine, without prompting from me, said that he too recently had an email disappear from his Gmail - an email he never would have trashed.

Remember kids:

Data YOU don't back up is data YOU don't want.

Don't depend on major organizations to do it for you. Do it yourself.

So now, I'll have to do a series on the best ways to download all that Google Mail mail and keep future mails backed up. And the contact list. And everything else online.

I have yet to find any online questions or comments about the problem and the Google Blog seems to be quiet on the subject but, well, just wait.....

We can't depend on Google to keep our email safe. We can't depend on Google to keep our contacts totally safe. And, apparently, we can't depend on Google to keep their search results totally reliable.....

1 comment:

Jonathan Eisen said...

I am also seeing a sudden increase in missing email that ended up in the gmail spam filter. Maybe people are screwing with the gmail system by labelling non spam as spam?