Hi guys, welcome to another video. In this video I'm going to show you what to do if
you are missing emails in your Gmail, or if you've permanently deleted an email and you want to get
it back. I'm going to be quite thorough because I know if you're missing an important email,
you really want to try everything you can to get it back. I've broken the video up into sections,
so feel free to skip to any part. And if you're quite a techy person
then you can skip past all the basics and you might want to head straight
to the part where I show you how to contact Google. So, let's get started.
Before we try to find your missing emails, if you think there's any chance that someone
might have hacked into your Gmail account and deleted your emails, then we need to change
your password straight away, so no-one else has any access to your account.
So if you need to change the password, open the Gmail website or the Gmail app.
Click on the circle in the top right. Then Manage Your Account. Then go to Security,
then scroll down to Signing in to Google, then Password.
You'll need to type in your current password, and then choose a new one.
While you're on the security page, it's a good idea to check your recent activity,
and if you think someone else has signed in from another device, you can lock them out here.
You should also look through Your Devices, and if you see any unusual
devices here, you can sign them out. For the rest of this video, I'm going to
be using the Gmail website on my computer, and I recommend that you use the website too if you can.
The website is mail.google.com. If you don't have a computer then you
should open up the web browser on your mobile device and go to the Gmail website that way.
Why do I suggest this? Well there are lots of different email apps out there and you
could be using any of them, so your screen will probably look different to mine. And sometimes
mail apps stop syncing properly, and you might find that if you go to the Gmail website
you could see your emails there straight away. And if that's the case then brilliant - all you
need to do then is go into the settings of your mail app and remove the Gmail account. I'm not
going to talk you through that because there are just too many mail apps out there. And then you
would add your Gmail account to the app again, and then hopefully it would sync properly now
and all your emails should be in there. So for the rest of the video I'm going
to assume you're on the Gmail website and you're signed in. Now let's check the Trash.
When you delete an email, it goes into a place called the Trash, where it's kept for 30 days
before it gets deleted permanently. This might be obvious if you're an experienced Gmail user, but
like I said earlier, we're being really thorough here. The Trash is in this area on the left.
You'll need to click on More, and then Trash. Or if you're British like me,
it will be called Bin. So click on that. Here are a load of emails I've deleted recently.
And here's one I didn't want to delete, so let's recover it.
I need to tick this box, and then at the top, click on this button, which
is Move To. And I'm going to move it to my inbox - that's done. And if I go back to my inbox now,
the email is there. By the way, if your trash is completely empty and
you were expecting to see some emails in it, then there's a chance your email account may have been
hacked, so go back to the section on how to lock down your email account like I showed you earlier.
Another place we need to look in is Spam, which is where any unsolicited emails go.
It's over here on the left again. Gmail will sometimes put emails in Spam on its own, but it's
also easy to mark an email as spam by accident. Anything left in Spam will be deleted after 30
days. So if you find your missing email in here, put a tick next to it, then click Not Spam.
And the email will go back to where it's supposed to be, which is usually the inbox.
As we're looking through these labels, it's worth looking through all of them
to see if you can find your missing emails. If you see this little triangle on a label, click
on it and it opens up, and there could be more labels inside. So make sure you look in there.
When I've helped people looking for their missing emails, we sometimes find that there's
more than one Trash or Deleted label because they've had an email app on their phone or
computer that's left it there. So have a look in all these labels for your emails.
Next, let's have a look in All Mail. In theory, All Mail should contain any emails
that are in your inbox or in any labels. So this is a big place worth looking through.
You've also got Sent Mail, which people often overlook at times like this.
Say you lost an email that someone sent to you. If you replied to their email or forwarded it to
someone, then that reply may contain the text from the original email, even if the original
was deleted.So make sure you look in Sent. If you know some specifics about the email
you're looking for, you can search for it in the Search bar near the top of the Gmail website.This
search bar is one of the best things about Gmail. It's fast and it nearly always works.
Type in a word from the subject or from the body of the email,
or you can type in the name of the person who sent it. Heres the important bit though - we
might have deleted this email, so we need to make sure we're looking everywhere including the Trash.
So click on this button to the right, which is Show Search Options. And down here where it
says Search All Mail, change it to Mail and Spam and Trash, or in my case - Bin. And then you can
fill in the form with as much information as you can about the email, such as when you would have
received it. And then click Search. So it's found some matching emails, and you can see a
couple of these emails have a little trash can icon, which shows that they have been deleted.
Now if you've tried all those things and you still can't find the deleted emails it's time to start
looking at contacting Google. Now if you have a free Gmail address then there's no way to just
phone up Google and ask for support. However they do provide a tool - it's at this address,
which you'll find in the Description for this video. Or you can just search for Gmail Message
Recovery Tool. Then follow the instructions on the screen. You don't get many options here,
and Google will only offer to recover emails from the last 30 days, but anything has to be worth a
try. When you send the form off, you normally hear back pretty quickly. Unfortunately this hasn't
been able to recover any emails for me today, but I have seen this tool recover permanently deleted
emails on a number of occasions before. If you pay for a Google One subscription,
even if you're only paying 1.59 a month, then you're entitled to support from a Google Expert.
You can get them by chat or email by going to this address, which is in the Description.
I guess if you're desperate to get your missing emails back, then paying a small amount for some
support might be worth looking at at this point. If you use Google Workspace at your work or
school, then you should contact your administrator - that's the IT person at your place of work
who looks after everyone's Google Accounts. They should have access to tools that may
be able to get your emails back. If you are the administrator, your can contact Google
for technical support. You'll need to go to the Google Admin Console, and in the top right, click
on the question mark.Then click Contact Support. The level and speed of support you'll get from
Google depends on which workspace plan you're on and whether you've paid for extra support.
I just want to cover one final thing, and that's if you're losing emails on a regular basis,
there could be something within Gmail that's automatically deleting them. There's a feature
in Gmail called Filters. Let's take a look. Click on Settings, then See all settings.
Then click Filters and Blocked Addresses. You can see I've got these 2 filters set up. So if
an email comes in with 'crypto or 'pharmacy' in the subject, it gets deleted, because I
get loads of unwanted emails containing those words. But that could delete an important email
that happens to contain one of those words. So I think it's a good idea to remove these filters.
Also down here, you might see a list of email addresses that have been blocked.
So if someone's emails aren't getting through to the inbox, you might need to unblock them here.
And if you're using special email software like Outlook or Thunderbird, that might have
its own set of rules or filters so have a good look through those settings for anything that
could be blocking or deleting emails. I know it's really hard when you lose
important data, so if this video has helped even one person get their missing emails back,
I'd be happy enough with that. So if it's helped you, please give the video a like,
let me know your experience in the comments below. And if you'd like to see more videos
from me in future, hit the red subscribe button. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.