[Marginally OT] Does GMail Actually Delete Email?

[Brad De Vries]

On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 12:38 AM, Kurt Wall <kwall at kurtwerks.com> wrote:
> Hi, list,
>
> I checked my GMail account via IMAP (using KMail, if you /must/ know)
> tonight. Much to my surprise, the "All Mail" folder had well north of
> 21,000 messages in it, dating back to to sometime in 2005 when I first
> got my GMail account. I'm /quite/ sure that I deleted that email (using
> the GMail interface, of course), so I was quite surprised to see that
> they had kept all that detritus around for 3+ years. Anyone else here
> had a similar experience?
>
> I've never trusted Google, so this isn't helping their cause with me...
>
> Kurt

Kurt, my experience has been that GMail does not delete mail unless
you explicitly click the <delete> button.

I have deleted some messages and now I cannot find them when I scan
through the "all mail" view nor when I search using the "search mail"
option.  So, it's reasonable for me to assume that GMail will delete a
message when the <delete> button is clicked.

I have not done any POP3 or IMAP communications with my GMail mailbox,
so I'm wondering if you're finding a problem that depends on one of
these protocols.

HTH,
Brad.