Google takes out your garbage for you!

[prathapml]

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

[Doenja]

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

[Swimming_Bird]

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

(messages that have been in Trash more than 30 days will be automatically deleted)

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

[Nerwin]

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

[prathapml]

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!!

[Swimming_Bird]

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.

[SiMoNsAyS]

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

[XtremeMaC]

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"...

[Nerwin]

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.

Edited December 11, 2005 by computerMan

[bledd]

who cares about trash :S

[Aaron_]

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??

[-I-]

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.

[mark]

My 32,000 mails - GONE!!!!!

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

[Phyridean]

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.

[Jeremy]

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