Ask HN: Has any of your Gmail emails gone missing? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Has any of your Gmail emails gone missing?

20 pointsuladzislau8 comments

At the moment I have 5 instances where incoming emails sent to my free Gmail address at different times from different company servers have gone missing - they are nowhere to be found: not in all mail, not in trash, not in spam. The senders didn't get any error or bounced back messages.

I'm really pissed off because all the emails were really important and I was only able to confirm that they've ever being sent via phone call. Oddly enough but Google has "emails gone missing" support form which I filled out. https://support.google.com/mail/contact/missingemails?rd%3D1

Now what should I use instead? I'm ready to pay for a more reliable email provider. Who would think that Gmail isn't?

P.S. I also found this comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12247401

"GMail once ate (bypassed spam and instantly deleted it, silently) an email filled with travel itinerary for an interview, causing me to miss the flight booked for me and the company I was interviewing with to have to book a second one (~$1k). If you find this hard to believe, go check your spam folder and see how many emails you have. Do you think you're really only getting ~1 spam message a day? This is the dark side of Google's spam filtering."

I moved to Fastmail to avoid such issues. They are reliable and, as a paying customer, it is easy to reach human support. They also escalate issues to the developers quickly, if necessary.

What I miss are some of Google's innovations beyond IMAP e-mail. Labels allowed for some work flows that cannot be realized with folders.

IMAP does labels too. Your client may not use them usefully though.

I know. But as long as neither Fastmail's (great) web interface nor any mail client known to me builds an interface with them that is comparable to Gmail's labels they are really not useful.

I personally use Office 365 for my domain, and man it rocks. I know there are some other email-only services out there, and some people are hell-bent towards Microsoft, but I can definitely say it has been the most reliable service I've used to date.

Also, for my purposes, the Office Suite is a nice plus.

If you have your own domain but don't need all the Office stuff, take a look at Outlook Premium[0].

Other options I know of are FastMail[1], and I've heard Rackspace email is reliable.

[0]: https://premium.outlook.com/

[1]: https://fastmail.com/

I once sent a table (that was html formatted) and gmail unceremoniously truncated it (without any warning). Googling around, it turns out that there's a known html size limit of 102k for gmail. That was something of an unpleasant surprise, given that I'd sort of come to expect that either the mail would be sent unmodified, or I'd be informed if there was an error. I now end up bcc-ing another account of mine if the mail is important.

If I might hijack the thread a little: I'm thinking of moving away from Google Apps (or GSuite) to another provider, but what about the access to Apps bought with that account? Is there any way to bulk transfer the licences to a normal gmail account?

Protonmail has been reliable and unlike gmail, it uses client side encryption. Android, ios and web clients have a minimal gmail feel.

https://protonmail.com/

I've noticed two sent messages weren't in my sent folder on separate occasions. Found it really odd.

ie, they were sent, no longer drafts, and not stuck in the outbox.

Is it just the spam filter?

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