lirazel | (no subject)

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crowdsourcing my problems

(no subject)

Do y'all have any idea why a lot of my lesser-used Gmail folders might suddenly be empty?

I absolutely know that I saved all my emails re: the UK trip my parents were supposed to take back in 2020 to a certain folder. However, when I open that folder, it appears empty and says "There are no conversations with this label." I haven't opened that folder in well over a year, so I have no idea when it all disappeared. Several others that I haven't used in a few years also appear empty, even though I know I did not empty them myself.

Did the emails get archived somewhere else? Any thoughts on how I can find them?

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Have you searched "all mail" for the missing emails?

Yup! No luck!

Are you on Windows or Mac? Using Gmail in a web browser or app?

Windows on my computer with Firefox, Mac on my phone through the email app.

Wow, you've got all the bases covered.

Even if they were accidentally archived, they should turn up in a search if you preface your keyword with in:anywhere

Or you can try just choosing a date range from the search options with a blank search term.

I was going to suggest that you might need to reset your internet connection because I have had older emails just disappear on my phone when I am in a location with crappy wifi like a hospital, but if the messages aren't turning up on your phone and computer that probably isn't it.

I am not enough of an expert to know if clearing your Gmail cache will fix a corrupted mailbox. At that point I would have to reach out to G support. :(

What bugs me most is that the auto-fill in the "to" part of a new message remembers the email address of the company I communicated with. But when I search that email address...I'm told that there aren't any

At that point I would have to reach out to G support. :(

They don't make that easy! They make you consult the "community"--I've found other people with my problem, but none of the suggested answers tell me a) why this happened or b) where my emails went. They don't give you the option of actually talking to a person!

Sheesh, they really don't want you to talk to a human. I was thinking about switching to Google Fiber, but I wonder if their customer service is also the equivalent of "just ask reddit"!

They REALLY don't. I remember when I was working in public libraries and people would forget their gmail passwords and it was literally impossible for them to reset them since they hadn't set up backup accounts or something. They would all be like, "Can't we call the company?" Nope. We cannot. You just have to create a new email account.

Wow, that's a very strange bug - I haven't seen that happen before. If they've been archived, you should still be able to see them when you click 'All mail.'

Is it possible they've been moved to spam or trash, somehow?

Right? I've searched the subject of the email I was looking for, the email address of the company, fiddled with the search filters, etc. My account clearly still "remembers" the email address--when I compose a new email and start to type in their email address, it autofills in the rest of it. But I cannot find any of the emails we very definitely exchanged.

Is it possible they've been moved to spam or trash, somehow?

I don't know how that would have happened to all the emails in multiple labels? There were six different labels, none of which I would have emptied, where the entire contents are missing.

I don't really use Gmail so I don't know if this is likely, but ... have the settings been changed somehow so that Gmail is only displaying sent/received emails from after a specific date?

I ask only because we use Outlook at work, and after a recent update, it defaulted to only displaying emails sent/received in the past year, and older emails disappeared, and didn't show up even when you searched for them by subject, sender, recipient, etc. I had to go in and change a bunch of settings to get it to revert back to displaying all emails, no matter what the date.

Is there any possibility this is the case with Gmail?

It could be, except that other labels that I use regularly still contain their contents from, like, 2012. So it's clearly not the date of the email itself? But I'm going to poke around more in the settings to see if there's something else going on.

I think -- I'm not 100% sure -- but I think that there is a tool deep in the settings where you can set an automatic deletion date for specific folders. It might be worth searching that out and making sure that you didn't accidentally set a deletion date for these labels.

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