Gmail losing email?
Has anyone else had a problem with Gmail simply losing mail?
I registered an application and the author sent me a license key, but I never got it. A few days later I sent him and email and he sent me a copy of the message he originally sent me, so I searched for the license key and found only this email – so it hadn’t ended up in the Spam filter.
Occasionally when I sign up for a forum, I never get the “click this link to verify your email address” message. I’ve assued it’s just been broken sites, but now I’m thinking Gmail is just dropping mail on me.
March 16th, 2007 at 10:16 am
SMTP is not a reliable platform.
It can also be because of SFP and other spam measures that never even reach your mail
March 16th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
I do sign up for a fair number of websites, and I haven’t seen that happen – yet.
April 2nd, 2007 at 9:18 am
I do have this problem. I actually googled for ‘Gmail losing email’ and got to your blog :-)
It happens both with confirmation emails (forum registration), and mailing lists. It starts to be very annoying (and no, it’s not the spam filter).
Iulian
April 4th, 2007 at 7:36 am
Are you sure? Never happened to me. In fact, I moved my website email hosting to Gmail account, cause I found it to be much more reliable
April 6th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
I googled for this too…. I received an email on April 1st (I know because the fact that it was April Fools Day was mentioned) and I did not delete it, and now it is gone. Had I accidentally deleted it, it would be in the Trash, but there is nothing in there on that day, though before and after it. WTF? Annoying!
September 10th, 2007 at 3:42 pm
My problem is that my sent messages are not retained. I’ll send a message and a few days later want to revisit it and it’s disappeared, causing me to question whether I actually sent the email. Today I verified an email I sent on September 2nd and went to look at gmail and it’s gone.
March 25th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
I had many times kept asking people to send mail that they are supposed to and i didnt get.
Then they told they have already sent it.
first i thought they were bluffing, thought how can email be lost.
but then it again happened.
Lost some really important mails.
dunno how many mails that i never know that i received
August 16th, 2008 at 5:53 am
Gmail and Google Apps Mail do, in fact, loose emails. I discussed this issue with professionals working for accredited ICANN registrars and hosting companies and for them it was a known issue. In my case incoming e-mail kept getting lost even after I added the senders to my contact list. By the way, these lost email never reached my Spam folder either.
After I’ve switched back from free mail hosting, to paid mail hosting I’ve never had any issues. It’s easier said than done with the awesome Gmail interface, speed and capacity (7GB+), but I try simply not to look back. In the end I have more order than before in my email and more importantly no lost emails. Also the most advertised feature, search, works much better now that I don’t have to search for whole words, but just parts of them or a few letters, which Gmail still doesn’t offer. I don’t miss ads either.
As for SMTP, I doubt it has many bugs. It has simply been around too long for that. In the least, I find it close to impossible for a full email to get lost without a corresponding delivery report.
October 1st, 2008 at 9:02 am
I am obsessed with reading and re-reading my emails to make sure that there are no mistakes, or missing words or letters.
Because of this, I know without any doubt that I do not make silly mistakes like leaving the ”y” off the word “they” for example.
In spite of this, I frequently go in to read my sent mail and find just that kind of thing.
Sometimes half the word or an entire word is missing. This has me wondering of I am going crazy and worries me that the people receiving my emails will assume I am an idiot…. Has anyone else noticed this with Gmail?
November 6th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
I searched for “gmail losing email” and found this forum as well because it is happening to me. I bought a flight to Israel last night, and received a confirmation e-mail. I forwarded that e-mail to about 15 friends and family there, also last night. They all got it, some responded up until this morning. By afternoon today, then entire thread (composed of about 10 e-mails), with the exception of 2 e-mails in that thread, is *completely* gone. Not in “Sent items”, not in “Trash”, nowhere! I am baffled. E-mail must be 100% reliable, how can we afford for it to be any less? I wonder if GMail knows about this issue.
November 6th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
The e-mail finally showed up now, about 5 hours after disappearing, in the Spam folder. The parts that were missing were in the Spam folder, and when I marked them as “Not spam”, the threat was all there and as good as new in my Inbox. I’m glad that’s resolved!
January 30th, 2009 at 8:53 am
This is very worrying – I had a user complain of mail going astray, and ran through the possibilities: accidentally deleted, flagged as spam etc – but the idea Gmail itself was eating messages after delivery? Absurdly far-fetched – I thought. Once or twice there were messages I couldn’t find, which were easily replaced – but then I went to set up IPv6 support. My new ISP is one of the few with native IPv6 support, so I had requested an address block just after signing up. Getting it working meant a firmware upgrade to my router, though, so I left the message sitting in my Gmail account, “safe” for when I had the router ready – or so I thought! When I went back to see what my prefix was, the message had simply disappeared into thin air. I could see my request to them, I could see subsequent status updates – but the reply I remembered receiving and reading? AWOL!
March 2nd, 2009 at 8:35 am
Yes, this has happened to me too. Sometimes, I just don’t get the e-mails. I googled this topic too, as someone who has just called me to do some work for them asked me why I hadn’t replied to their e-mail from last week. It never arrived and it was not in my spam box either. Bizarrely, with one friend, we use a different gmail address I have (a ‘spare’) and it works without a problem, but with my everyday e-mail address, none of my e-mails make it into her inbox. She does not use gmail. This is really starting to worry me.
March 13th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
yes i was googling the same problem and it also happened to me. my sent mails always turn to get lost by themselves. i check it in ma all mails list and also in trash but its nevr there as well.. if only i could get a solution to this. its troubling me alot since i’m loosing all my important mails
April 8th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
Yes, all the time.
I broke up with a long distance boyfriend because he claims to have sent me emails and I didn’t get any. When he persisted, I told him that he was lying and after couple months of “you didn’t; yes I did,” we ended our relationship.
Months later, when my sister called and told me she emailed me a nice poem (she’s AOL subscriber) and I didn’t receive it, I had her send it to me on five different occasions but not one came through. Now I only use my company email account when exchanging emails with my sister. (Yes, I feel bad about not believing boyfriend but it is too late now.)
I am still noticing missing emails but I guess I can’t complain since this is free.
April 27th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
As I opened gmail an email appeared then vanished. I looked everywhere. Has happened before but I was not sure before now.
April 27th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
It sounds like you’re creating problems yourself by trying to solve this issue instead of looking at why their is a problem in the first place.
May 4th, 2009 at 11:05 pm
Same deal for me. Gmail is dropping emails that are sent (a friend just sent me 2 emails; I received the first one 2 hours later than the email he sent 4 minutes later) and dropping emails that i know I sent as well. This is a new phenomenon, though.
May 14th, 2009 at 8:48 am
Just noticed my lost e-mails that are forwarded to my gmail account. Something must be done abt this!
June 6th, 2009 at 11:52 pm
I have discovered some problems with gmail. It seems that one or maybe two emails are not getting threw from att.net users. Not sure why.
Rob
June 17th, 2009 at 2:43 am
I have noticed alot of email not getting through to me, It seems to be certian addresses but not always. I have lost a flight itinery and a doctors appointment that I know of, which just never came through, though sometimes they arrive on resend.
Sounds like I might have to go back to hotmail. aA pity since I have had gmail for ages.
August 10th, 2009 at 2:56 am
No question about it, Gmail “loses” messages and it is happenning with ever greater frequency. Some of my people complained about it a few months back. I thought they were just making it up to cover their asses. But now it is happenning to me.
As much as it will be an major pain, I am going to migrate my entire system away from Gmail. Pity, it was so good for so long.
August 13th, 2009 at 3:38 am
Yes, it happened me as well. Simply I didn’t received some important emails, and got in the trouble because of this issue.
And as I noticed, that some email addresses within the company are affected with this problem, and some are not. It doesn’t have a logic.
I don’t know how to solve this problem, because it seems that the mail is lost during the mail processing/handling at the gmail’s mail server.
When I’ll set up a mail forwarding rule on my gmail address, probably this will not helps because those lost mails are lost before the rules
are checked. It was a big mistake to use a @gmail.com address for important messaging and I passed and registered this mail to too many
places.
August 28th, 2009 at 1:10 am
Gmail seems to be dropping emails for me as well. It’s happened about 3 times in the last two months, maybe 5 total in the last year. Of course, by its nature you often don’t know it happened, but I just now had a conversation with someone and mentioned that they had ignored an email of mine, and they claimed the opposite. We’re both using gmail addresses! And I had checked the spam folder for this particular instance. Very weird.
September 3rd, 2009 at 10:46 am
I took an independent study class from a local university that required weekly emails. The professor was quite confused/upset when he hadn’t heard from me for 3 weeks. I would reply to the professor’s emails as well as start new threads. I also wouldn’t hear from the professor for 3-4 weeks at a time. I thought the professor was going crazy by claiming he never received an email, not responding to my emails, and then blaming me for not doing my part. It was very frustrating. Then 6 months later a friend told me some emails he sent from his gmail account were never received so I figured it had to be gmail. Something needs to be done about this. You would think since it has happened to more than just a couple of people, this would be big news.
September 15th, 2009 at 9:37 am
Happening to me too, and I’ve only been using it for about a week. Pity, because I really wanted a reliable web-based platform.
September 21st, 2009 at 10:45 am
Just happened to me. Lost some email threads that were 20 messages in length.
September 24th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
Today, right now. I’ve lost my mail. It seems people also lose their mail till today. I wonder what really happened.
I should make backup my of important mails and purge the inbox. Gaining 7369 MB of free space sounds really nice!
October 4th, 2009 at 9:52 am
This is insane. it has happened to me too. They just disappear, it can be in draft, sent, in box or whatever it doesn’t matter. But what is weird is I also have e-mails I KNOW I deleted, reappear.
October 5th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
google uses postini
October 14th, 2009 at 9:35 pm
I also googled ‘problem with gmail going astray?’ and landed here. Haven’t noticed anything disappearing from my inbox, maybe because I label and archive everything quickly, but I’m convinced that several of my emails never reached the recipients. The first time I was really troubled and hurt because I couldn’t understand why a good friend was suddenly ignoring my messages. Now it’s happening with another friend. I never noticed this problem before the last month or so.
October 16th, 2009 at 6:19 am
I have faced various problems with gmail.
POP3 retrieval: Occasionally a few messages are not retireved by POP3. I get 50-60 messages daily (not spam) and comparing downloaded emails with webmail is not feasible.
Delays: receiving emails with delays, not sure that it is a gmail problem, but likely (other recipents receive much faster).
Lost messages: Somewhere, Somewhere, HELP.
David
October 20th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
It happened to me this morning. I just use the Web interface and the iPhone Mail app. Someone told me six hours ago that they sent me an e-mail. It never arrived. Then they forwarded it again, and I could see in the original that they had the correct address. I double checked the Spam, Trash and All mail folders.
October 29th, 2009 at 8:43 pm
I’ve seen this in the last few days too, both when sending to a gmail user, and when being sent emails. I haven’t noticed a pattern yet. It’s happened in the past too. Yes, gmail is free and awesome, but the #1 contract should be “We will not lose your email.” Migrating is a major pain, though.
I’m shocked google aren’t on this. Anyone posted to their discussion groups or blog?
October 30th, 2009 at 3:52 am
I used my iphone this morning to check my gmail account. There were an email with 3 images and 1 I had to download. It was at 5am so when I went back to check again they were gone. Only that I had to download I would have thought I was dreaming but obviously not. This is pretty poor.
November 30th, 2009 at 1:33 am
I’ve also noticed occasional missing email in my gmail account for at least a couple of years now. I forward all email to another email account which is downloaded to my main desktop. Apparently emails are forwarded even email not appearing in my gmail inbox. It is disconcerting though, I rely on gmail for work especially when traveling. I’ve been using email for over 20 years and other than gmail never had a problem with missing emails.
December 3rd, 2009 at 2:48 pm
This has been happening to me with more and more frequency. Not only are incoming emails getting lost, but outgoing email is sometimes not arriving, either. I’ve tried to escalate this within Gmail’s help interface, but that apparently is a similar black hole that emits no light. You could say we get what we pay for…except that I used to have a paid service (Yahoo premium) and had even more problems over there…which is why I switched to Gmail. Oh, well. Probably the only failsafe way to ensure email arrives is to host your own smtp server…?
December 22nd, 2009 at 2:28 pm
This has, according to people who have tried to email me, happened to me also. I am going to have to say goodbye to gmail for all but the silliest things.
February 5th, 2010 at 8:00 am
You people are retarded. Gmail does not lose mail. You either deleted the email by mistake, the person never sent it, or you work for Billy boy and just want to derail Gmail in any way you can. If it was true it would be VERY simple to setup an account, do a controlled experiment in a recorded environment and send thousands of emails from thousands of places to the gmail account and when even a single email didn’t come in then bam, it would be on CNN, NBC, everywhere as big news so that Billy boys stock would jump as people flocked back in droves to pop based emails with *ta-da* Outlook to read them, popping hundreds of $$ per user into Billy boys pockets.
Its simple people, is there a worldwide conspiracy with Google and disappearing emails that you somehow have cracked the code on, or that some people out there simply don’t know what they are doing? Lookup Occam’s Razor and see what I mean. The simplest answer is usually the right one.
February 9th, 2010 at 12:37 pm
You people are retarded. Gmail does not lose mail.
yes it does.
I’ve created new gmail accounts, and mailed myself from my other accounts. about 25% loss rate for some types of mail. If it was a fwd it is very unreliable now. This is only for my long held account, not my brand new ones. they get mail just fine. Perhaps the system suddenly does not have a real 7Gb capacity ??
no, they are not in the spam folder
no, I have all filters disabled
no, I’m nowhere near my capacity
no, I’m not some paid operative.
March 30th, 2010 at 9:38 am
I have had this issue before. My boss sent email to all for a meeting and I never got it. I work from home but was required to go to office that day. Luckily I showed up in office was able to attend the meeting. No one believed me when I told them that I never got the email. Now this morning my colleague has been trying to send some files to me and no luck. The email are not getting delivered. I gave him a different email and the email came without any problem. I am kinda baffled. Don’t know whats going on. Oh well…
June 10th, 2011 at 8:03 am
I thought I was just being careless. But, more than once I will remember something someone wrote in an email and I will try to look it up in Gmail. When I look for the message, I can’t find it. I even check every message from that person in my inbox and trash and the email is gone.
I am also learning to hate the way Gmail threads messages. I think I’m going back to Outlook.