My Google Gmail account was wiped!

[Scarecrow]

For some unknown reason, all of my GMAIL that was in my inbox or in my sent mail before last Tuesday morning, was deleted. I have no idea how and apparently there is no way to recover it. I am pretty upset over this; it feels like someone came into my home and stole all my mementos and personal stuff. I don't know the email client you use, but you may want to somehow manage to make copies of your mail before a similar disaster befalls you.

 

I went on various forums to see about recovery methods and the gist is no. There is no real contact for Google's free stuff. You have to depend on forums for advice. Nothing official.

 

I had a strong password and never gave it out, nor ever click on any link I don't know; never tempted by various phising attempts tossed my way.

 

I set up my Outlook client to access my gmail account now via IMAP, but it still takes a bit of effort to go in and save notes to my hard drive. I haven't found an easy, free solution for my Yahoo mail accounts.

 

So consider this a friendly warning. Don't assume Google, Yahoo, or any other online source will never ever screw up, drop a pointer or two, and then, poof, your stuff is gone.

[Bob Palin]

Before I used Gmail I used Mozilla Thunderbird, every now and then (not often enough) I start Thunderbird and let it download all my mail. It's horribly slow and the email is still in a non human readable form, but at least I wouldn't lose it all. I would like to find a way to sync Thunderbird and Gmail so that all my mail was in both places but haven't seen that opportunity yet.

 

Any other ways to backup Gmail? Preferably in ways that in an emergency can still let you look at the mail with a browser or text editor.

[ghaverkamp]

Any other ways to backup Gmail? Preferably in ways that in an emergency can still let you look at the mail with a browser or text editor.

 

IMAP's pretty much the way to do it. You can either pull everything down by turning on full sync in a mail client or by using something like Fetchmail. Lots of folks have written little tools to pull down IMAP mailboxes. (e.g., Gmail Backup)

 

They don't make it any easier for enterprise customers. It's either IMAP or the Google Apps Audit API, except that the latter doesn't retain folder (i.e., label) structure or message metadata.

 

My employer has a bit over 6,000 Gmail mailboxes right now. Access by anything other than the web client is generally a bit flaky. And with that many users, there's pretty much always a Google service problem. It's not my job to deal with the user problems, thank goodness, but I did do most of our architecture to migrate accounts and email to Google, worked on a piece of our Google Calendar migration, and have written all of our internal tools for our day-to-day interaction with Google Apps. I am no longer much of a Google booster.

[James Clark]

Before I used Gmail I used Mozilla Thunderbird, every now and then (not often enough) I start Thunderbird and let it download all my mail. It's horribly slow and the email is still in a non human readable form, but at least I wouldn't lose it all. I would like to find a way to sync Thunderbird and Gmail so that all my mail was in both places but haven't seen that opportunity yet.

 

Any other ways to backup Gmail? Preferably in ways that in an emergency can still let you look at the mail with a browser or text editor.

 

Have you looked into Evolution? I use it to sync my contact and calendar, but it does mail as well.

 

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/E-mail/E-mail-Clients/Evolution-for-Windows.shtml

 

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/26014/novell-evolution

[Selden]

Rats. Thanks for the heads up. I'm downloading all my Gmail using POP right now. Help here: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=13275

 

[bobbybob]

I would get Google on the phone and really let them have it. I would demand a refund of every penny I have ever sent them!! Brow-beat 'em some too. Hey Google, "This is not acceptable" and "I am going to post bad things about you on the interwebs and tell all my friends", etc, etc.

 

What? It's FREE? Oh. Never mind.

 

(I share your pain, really I do.)

[Bob Palin]

I'm really glad you brought this up, I just started downloading email to Thunderbird as a backup and discovered it's been 2 years since I last did it - 2 Years - WTF? Where did the time go?

[Dennis Andress]

.... 2 Years - WTF? Where did the time go?

 

You got involved in bicycling....

[SageRider]

.... 2 Years - WTF? Where did the time go?

 

You got involved in bicycling....

...and unrally web sites...

...

...

...

and most of all, Janet!!!!

[VinnyR11]

If you have off-line usage set up, I believe Gmail and Calendar sync to your hard-drive. Pull up Gmail while not on-line to see if perhaps it didn't sync after the deletions. You may get lucky.

 

I'm sure you checked your Gmail "trash", but sometimes when we're so aggravated we can overlook simple solutions...just in case.

 

With a secure strong password, this really seems odd. A lot of work for not much bang for the buck on the hackers part.

 

 

[Scarecrow]

I would get Google on the phone and really let them have it. I would demand a refund of every penny I have ever sent them!! Brow-beat 'em some too. Hey Google, "This is not acceptable" and "I am going to post bad things about you on the interwebs and tell all my friends", etc, etc.

 

What? It's FREE? Oh. Never mind.

 

(I share your pain, really I do.)

 

 

(the point of my note is to let everyone know they should not blindly think they don't have to ever think about recovery)

[Scarecrow]

If you have off-line usage set up, I believe Gmail and Calendar sync to your hard-drive. Pull up Gmail while not on-line to see if perhaps it didn't sync after the deletions. You may get lucky.

 

I'm sure you checked your Gmail "trash", but sometimes when we're so aggravated we can overlook simple solutions...just in case.

 

With a secure strong password, this really seems odd. A lot of work for not much bang for the buck on the hackers part.

 

 

Unfortunately I don't have off-line usage set up. I did check Trash, Archive, Sent, basically everywhere. No luck. but you do make a valid point; sometimes when aggravated I overlook the obvious.

[Scarecrow]

Update: No luck getting anything back. but I did set up my Outlook client to synch (via IMAP) with gmail and will regularly copy mail to my hard drive, preferably sooner than every 2 years. (Killer - at least you'll now be caught up.) Now I'll just have to remember to back up my hard drive.

 

I also have Yahoo mail accounts and have not found a way to access them via IMAP or POP without paying them money. If anyone has suggestions for those, I'd appreciate hearing them.

 

 

[Bob Palin]

(Killer - at least you'll now be caught up.)

It ran for about 5 hours last night before I shut it off and another 3 hours this morning, is now caught up, over 16,000 emails downloaded.

[James Clark]

Update: No luck getting anything back. but I did set up my Outlook client to synch (via IMAP) with gmail and will regularly copy mail to my hard drive, preferably sooner than every 2 years. (Killer - at least you'll now be caught up.) Now I'll just have to remember to back up my hard drive.

 

I also have Yahoo mail accounts and have not found a way to access them via IMAP or POP without paying them money. If anyone has suggestions for those, I'd appreciate hearing them.

 

 

http://techblissonline.com/yahoo-pop3-and-smtp-settings/

 

It's a good idea to check in with webmail occasionally as I've had mail tagged as spam because the sender wasn't in my Yahoo contacts.

 

 

[Scarecrow]

It ran for about 5 hours last night before I shut it off and another 3 hours this morning, is now caught up, over 16,000 emails downloaded.

 

Yeeeooooowwwwchhhhhh!

[Scarecrow]

http://techblissonline.com/yahoo-pop3-and-smtp-settings/

 

It's a good idea to check in with webmail occasionally as I've had mail tagged as spam because the sender wasn't in my Yahoo contacts.

 

Thanks. I was hoping for an IMAP solution, but will settle for te POP one. I think I will be in the same boat as Killer and need a day or two to download what I have.

[Green RT]

I think I am too old to trust cloud stored solutions like leaving all my mail on Google's servers. I keep it all on a local computer. And everything on the local computer is backed up automatically to a second hard disk every hour. And every few weeks I clone it to a third hard disk. I have mail folders going back to 1993. A year or so ago, I went back and pulled up messages from 1996. It wouldn't be the end of the world if I lost it, but storage is cheap. All the mail occupies about 1 GB.

[Selden]

I downloaded all my Gmail messages using Apple's mail client; it took a few hours, but I had lots of other things to do. Thanks again for the heads up on this.