Gmail Autodeletes Emails

TechCrunch reports that nearly 60 Gmail users discovered that their inbox had been partially or completely wiped out. It was not just the inbox, but the complete account including Contacts, Sent Mail and Folders. Users have started talking over this issue on GMail Help Group

Here’s what Google had to say to TechCrunch:

Regretfully, a small number of our users — around 60 — lost some or all of their email received prior to December 18th. Once we found out about this issue, we worked day and night to confirm that only a few accounts were affected and to do whatever we could to restore as much of the users’ accounts as we could. We’ve also reached out to the people who were affected to apologize and to work with them to restore the email from any personal backup they might have.

We know how important Gmail is to our users – we use it ourselves for our corporate email. We have extensive safeguards in place to protect email stored with Gmail and we are confident that this is a small and isolated incident.

How can you Backup your emails?

Gmail had been providing a fantastic service, I didn’t even bother to delete my old mails, but now that this issue came to light, we have to backup our mails somehow. There isn’t a clear cut utility or tool which easily allows you to backup your Gmail inbox, but you can make use of Post Office Protocol or better known as simply POP to download all your mails to your local Email Client (I use Thunderbird).