Deleted my emails on my Samsung phone and lost them all?

[#1]

Hello Good People - This is a last gasp appeal really for being completely daft. 🙄 Long story short, I got gifted a Samsung s9+ phone second hand from a good friend of mine as my old phone is 2g/3g, so I wanted something that was at least LTE to allow me a little wiggle room incase my mobile provider decides to close their 3g connectivity. I just removed the SIM card and placed it into the Samsung and all went fine. Just did the initial set up. 

Now, I`ve used a Smartphone for ten+ years but have always been a bit scared of the `sync` between Gmail and my Home laptop when using my phone, so didn`t allow my emails from my Gmail account to load onto my phone as I prefer to do that on my laptop.

Here`s the problem....and I don`t know for the life of me how I didn`t realize this, but seeing my emails lined up on the phone when I opened the Gmail `app`, I thought, `I know, I`ll just delete them all` and then turn off `sync`....to prevent any more emails being sent to my phone. 

I then open my Gmail on my laptop to find they are all gone! Not in Trash either, but just deleted permanently!?? I looked in the Trash thinking they would all be deleted but held in Trash for up to 30 days, but NO, they were not there? 😧 So then begun the search to retrieve them to no avail. YouTube vids, Google Help, trying the Search bar and going through the alphabet to see if it would throw up anything I could get back, but only a few old emails (Argos emails or a few that were historic) so didn`t matter either way.

What DID matter was I had a few links within a couple of emails from my GP surgery with my medical records on them up to a certain year for printing off some information which I done at the time, so should have then Archived those emails and removed them from my Inbox but I stupidly left them there. 

Having tried all the online routes and guides, I feel I`ve exhausted everything except to contact Google themselves. What annoys me is that when I deleted the emails on the phone, why didn`t they go to Trash? Where I could easily have retrieved them? Just doesn`t make sense, unless I`m missing something? I opened the BIN on the Gmail page and it was empty, just like the one on my laptop is empty. 

Any help on this would be much appreciated but I understand it`s not as simplistic as Google make it. Had they deleted and gone to Trash, I wouldn`t be trying this.

Thanks for reading. A disgruntled and exhausted member...

[#2]

Moderator's note(s):

Thread moved from General Chat to Tech Help.

[#3]

@plusmouse    Go to Messages  tap Menu bar    3 dots  ( More Options ) -  Recycle Bin,  click messages you want to  Restore

Apparently they are only kept for 30 days though....

Good Luck

Your "recycle bin" may have the title "Trash"

Check the Trash in Samsung Messages.

You can restore deleted messages directly from the Trash.

Navigate to and open the Samsung Messages app, then tap More options (the three vertical dots), and then tap Trash. Touch and hold the message you’d like to recover. You can also tap All to select all messages in the Trash. Then, tap Restore or Restore all.

[#4]

Hi shutter - Unfortunately I tried both of those and neither my laptop Trash, or the BIN on my Samsung phone have any of those deleted emails in them, which begs the question, WHY are they not there??? If they were, all I had to do was restore them back to my Inbox. 

All I did was scroll down the phone screen to see the the emails I had currently on the phone that were also on my laptop (same Gmail account) and because I planned on turning Sync OFF on the phone to stop it pushing emails whenever I received any on my laptop, I decided (stupidly) to delete them straight from the phone one by one. I only kept a few emails that came through from Google and Samsung when I reactivated the phone after setting it up with my SIM. Which went smoothly.

I suppose I had what I can only describe as a senior moment. 🙄 Why I didn`t stop to think before I deleted is beyond me. For some reason my brain thought the emails on the phone wouldn`t disappear from my laptop Gmail when they were one and the same account! 

I`ve accepted that unless I contact Google directly I`m no chance of seeing them again. But I`m frustrated that by deletion, they should have landed in the Trash area and they didn`t. Which I can`t explain and can`t seem to find why not because that`s exactly what should have happened. It`s a mystery. 

*Edited to add: I didn`t realize there was a Samsung messages? I`ll have a look for that and see if that throws anything up. 

[#5]

@plusmouse  I then open my Gmail on my laptop to find they are all gone! Not in Trash either, but just deleted permanently!?? I looked in the Trash thinking they would all be deleted but held in Trash for up to 30 days, but NO, they were not there? 

@plusmouse  Unfortunately I tried both of those and neither my laptop Trash, or the BIN on my Samsung phone have any of those deleted emails in them, which begs the question, WHY are they not there??? I

I very much doubt if you can recover your emails. Whilst it’s true that Gmail keeps deleted items for 30 days before permanently deleting then I think you’ll find the 30 days is based on the date they were received NOT the date they were placed in the bin. I too have lost the odd wanted email as you did, due to being too quick to delete.

The Gmail app on my smartphone is in perfect sync with the webmail page i.e. deleting from either deletes both.

[#6]

@plusmouse have you tried the Gmail Message recovery tool https://support.google.com/mail/workflow/9317561?hl=en

[#7]

Thanks everyone for trying to help with this.

I fear @Batfrog  you may be correct about the "30 days" window being from the date the email was sent to me, rather than the date I deleted it. That is something that didn`t occur to me. I always thought it meant the clock started when the email(s) being deleted hit the Trash/Bin. 

@MisterW : Yes, I`ve tried the Recovery tool three times now with the same result. 

I`m about to give up to be honest but I read a few google articles this morning from the Android Community webpages (not a member myself), that mentioned this below:

*Quote from user: "If I delete messages on my phone, they disappear. If I delete messages on my laptop, they go to TRASH"!

This is what`s happening to me! 🤔

*In reply to the above poster someone wrote: "Could it be a configuration difference on the phone?/account?

Settings>POP/IMAP>IMAP Access. 

When I read the above I thought yes, same thing I`m seeing, but because I only got this phone last week, I`ve had barely enough time to check all the features out and in my haste, thought I was being clever and deleted the emails from the Gmail app only to discover they had gone completely even though the Gmail app has a BIN area (while the PC has a Trash area). It didn`t place the deleted emails in there for me to recover once I`d seen my mistake. but as Batfrog pointed out, I may be flogging a dead you know what....

[#8]

Okay, so I changed my gmail IMAP setting to ENABLED as it was disabled (even though my emails were coming through on my Samsung phone regardless). I then ran the same `Some of my emails are missing` tool and got the same result. Can`t find the deleted emails from a few days ago and yet, I tested it myself by sending myself an email, opening it it on the Samsung phone, sent it to BIN and it was in there! So now I`m wondering why the other emails I deleted failed to appear in that BIN folder a few days ago? 🤔 

I still have POP Disabled in gmail and I`m not understanding whether BOTH IMAP & POP need to be enabled and if so, why? I also noticed I had a deleted email in my TRASH folder on my laptop but strangely enough, it wasn`t showing on the phone as being in the BIN area. Something not quite matching up here.....