Made me chuckle. I've been told off by a former Googler colleague enough times now to have learned that Gmail is more complex than anyone imagines on a first guess, in order to be "reliable".
So to anyone relying on gmail for safe keeping: Don't.
Do you feel you are you competent enough (in e.g. SMTP and MIME) to distinguish between MIME-encoded base64 inline images (super rare) and references to images on external web sites (a lot more common)? Which in the case of old web sites are quite likely to stop working if you revisit old mails.
Did you make the effort to verify that it was the first type when you witnessed this?
Also - your suggestion would have been a lot less douchey without that "laff".
It was inline do by means of a data-url in an img-tag in case you want the details ;)
And no offense taken. It's a fair question.
Keeping your "deleted" stuff hidden wouldn't hurt them.
Source?
Please write to support and ask them to investigate. I used to work on the Gmail backend team, so I know bug reports regularly make it through support to an engineer. I also know they take data integrity quite seriously and have a variety of tools to investigate (potential) problems, both proactively and in response to user complaints such as yours. They also keep redundant copies of everything.
Breaking a mbox is an extremely simple thing, as the format leaves no possibility of error checking, parallel writing, rewriting lost data, or anything else.
Outlook's mail folders are marginally better, allowing for error detection, but really, that's a lame first paragraph for introducing a great article.