14 DAY TRIAL // If you're a Gmail user, listen up closely, this might come in handy: users all over are starting to complain on the respective support forums that they have lost all or part of their mail "one pretty morning". The moment they entered their Gmail account they were less than happy to see that the inbox was empty and that all the mail in other folders was deleted too.
It's not the same for everyone, Jessica Squazzo, a writer and editor discovered that she had lost only the messages from 2007, Jeneane Sessum, a social media consultant and writer lost everything while Gary S. Moore lost all his archived messages, including more than 100 photos. And by lost I do mean vanished without any trace.
Matt Cain, Gartner president and lead e-mail analyst says that it is a rather new problem that hasn't been encountered this far at the rival Yahoo Mail or Hotmail, traditionally associated with a high degree of data integrity in their message repositories. "I can't validate [that this is a problem with Gmail] but if it's true, it's coming at an unfortunate time for Google, because the company is aggressively pushing into the enterprise e-mail space," Cain said, referring to the Gmail component of the Google Apps hosted collaboration and communication application suite, designed for organizations of all sizes, including large ones with its Premier edition.
"The peak in complaints of this problem occurring was this year's July although reports of it never stopped from coming. A Google spokesman declined to address any of these situations in particular citing privacy reasons, but instead emphasized that "most issues like this are a result of phishing attacks or compromised passwords -- or sometimes simply messages mistakenly deleted or marked as spam -- not a data corruption issue."
That seems not to be the case, as almost every one to complain is Internet and mail savvy and would not fall for cheap tricks like that. My advice? Perhaps a backup of your messages might be a good idea right about now.