Well, it looks like Gmail decided to have some fun with my email. You see, I use Gmail for two reasons. First, it's a great spam filter. It kills about 99% of the spam I get (and there's a lot of it), and second, if I know I'm going to be traveling, I just shut down Outlook on my desktop PC and I can read everything that comes in via the Gmail web client.
Anyhow, Gmail decided a little over a month ago to just randomly delete a whole bunch of my mail. Why? Not sure. I didn't even think to check that there was stuff missing until I tried forwarding myself something I received on my laptop - and it never reached my office. So I hunted and searched, then lo and behold I found it in my Gmail TRASH folder along with a whole bunch of mail, randomly deleted over the past 45 days or so.
I was able to move all of that mail to my Inbox, and I'm downloading it now to Outlook. Problem is, Gmail only saves things in the Trash folder for 30 days, so I'm sure some things are permanently gone.
Why am I posting this here? Well, if you emailed me anything over the past 30 days, and I haven't replied to you, chances are your mail was sitting in my Gmail trash bin. I'm downloading it all now, and I'll be going over it tonight and hopefully replying to as much of it as possible.
If you don't hear from me in a couple of days, assume your mail was LOST (especially if you sent it more than 30 days ago). Send it again.
This is why I tell EVERYONE in EVERY piece of email that I send out: "if your message is important, send it via my customer service web form at www.599cd.com/contact." That all goes DIRECTLY into my 599CD database and never gets transmitted via email.
Email is unreliable! I've read stats on some sites that up to 20% of email never reaches its destination. And then there's spam. Ugh.
Hopefully someone will come up with a BETTER standard for email in the near future. The current one stinks.