[Closed] All our Gmails have disappeared.

Disappeared from where?

Have you tried webmail in a browser?

Do you have three separate accounts?

Have you tried opening the Inbox / folder you've accidentally closed?

We have 3 accounts and on all devices they have gone.Android phones, iPads and macs.
Logged into the accounts on our MacBook and there are some there but 2019 back to 2016.
Sent an email from a gmail account to another and that is there.

Looked in the Gmail trash bin ?

Our shop gmail account has our shop email account linked to it as Siteground is so unreliable.
Logged onto Siteground and there's no emails there.
Basically all our emails have disappeared. No idea what's going on.

Generously, that answers about half of what I asked.

If you want assistance here then you need to explain, in detail, what your setup is, what you're seeing and what you're doing. How your three accounts are configured, how you access them, and what common denominators there might be between these things.

Three unrelated Google accounts on multiple unrelated devices do not just coincidentally disappear. It's just not possible unless Google are experiencing an outage, in which case the best thing you can do is wait.

Going "it doesn't work" doesn't help with a diagnosis, you wouldn't do that with your car at a garage when the problem could be anything from a flat tyre to the engine on fire. Explain the symptoms you're seeing, as detailed and as accurately as you can. "When I do X I see Y and I expect to see Z."

Siteground is so unreliable.
Logged onto Siteground and there’s no emails there.

Well.

Apologies, not computer savvy at all.
Mrs Zip started looking at shop emails on her android phone. We put the piggy backed shop gmail on the phones as its far easier than trying to set up the siteground account.
As she was looking at the emails they were disappearing before her eyes.
On my android phone I can see the gmail that I sent from the shop gmail, then the next email after that is december 2018.

If you open a web browser, go to www.gmail.com and log in - are there emails?

You might need to change to view “all emails” not just “unread” on the left somewhere.

As Cougar has said, log into your gmail in a browser rather than on an app on a phone or something else.  Once in the browser check the 'All Mail' folder rather than just the inbox.  If there isn't anything there then try the Bin.  The bin gives you 30 days to recover so you need to start looking at this now rather than later

edit: I'm 2 mins late but basically what IA said except just go straight to https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#all  to see all your mails

If you are using Gsuite rather than just plain gmail accounts then I think you can recover 30 days after they are deleted from the bin as well, but start with the stuff above first

My money is on one of your mail clients being set up to access your accounts using POP, and it's downloaded the emails locally and they've been deleted from the server.

Look in the gmail logs to see what activity has happened:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/45938?hl=en-GB

Check the settings for POP3 on your gmail account - the 'My emails are deleted from gmail' link on here:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7104828?hl=en-GB#zippy=%2Cmy-emails-are-deleted-from-gmail

You need to do both of the above on a browser.

Apologies, not computer savvy at all.

No apologies necessary. We only know what you tell us, is the problem. Eg, you don't need to understand an error message but you do need to be able to read it.

We put the piggy backed shop gmail on the phones

What does "piggy-backed" mean?

As she was looking at the emails they were disappearing before her eyes.

My money is on one of your mail clients being set up to access your accounts using POP

That my good friend is an exceptionally solid shout and in the absence of further information to the contrary is where my money would be also.

HAve you considered the possibility that you have completed the internet and you have been returned to level 1?

That my good friend is an exceptionally solid shout and in the absence of further information to the contrary is where my money would be also.

Which is also good news as as far as I know with Gmail they dont normally get deleted when you pick them up using POP, they just get archived so you still see them in all mail.   For legacy reasons a couple of our users still pick up their mail by pop but it is still all available online.  At very worst it is still in the bin

Get thee to a browser to check

All your Gmail are belong to us. 😉

Good luck finding a solution.

Zippy, I know you said you are not computer savvy, but do you think you can recreate this on my personal emails (gmail) and work emails? Would lighten the load a bit 🙂

We had a similar situation at work, someone got a colleague to step up and cover their role for a week. At the end of the week they came back to work and a day later all their emails disappeared. The guy that stepped up thought the emails were local to his laptop so just cleared the whole inbox on the server!

PS Joking aside, hope you sort it.

As Mr torso hinted:

A search for IMAP vs POP3, my boldening ...

IMAP is better if you are going to be accessing your email from multiple devices, such as a work computer and a smart phone. POP3 works better if you are only using one device, but have a very large number of emails. It is also better if you have a poor internet connection and need to access your emails offline. For most people, IMAP will suit their needs better.

Note: If emails start disappearing from your inbox without you deleting them, it almost always means one of your devices is on POP3. Backing up the emails and then resetting up the email account as IMAP will fix the problem.

Phoned Siteground last night and he said to check POP.
Only thing I can think of is that I resurrected an old iPad 2 days ago which we listen to music on at the shop.
Pretty certain it doesn’t have email on it as I wanted maximum storage space.
Siteground back up the emails daily so I was able to restore them and they are back in gmail too.
My personal gmails are back as well . Very odd but bloody relieved Siteground do back ups.

Have you checked the POP3 settings in Gmail? If you don't figure out the problem, you are at risk of disappearing emails again.

I resurrected an old iPad 2 days ago

I was about to post "When any bit of technology behaves oddly, ask what recent changes were made?" This applies to any technology, in the traditional meaning, not just 'internet'. Cars breaking down when just 'serviced', etc.

Siteground back up the emails daily

That's surprising. I can see why they would backup email if they were hosting it, but why would they copy mail from Google's servers onto theirs? Unless that's something linked to the 'piggyback', whatever that is. Since you're running a business, zippykona, it would be worth putting the time in to learn how your IT is set up, before a misunderstanding does serious damage.
Pleased you've fixed it this time, anyway!

The shop music iPad doesn't have any emails on it so the plot thickens.
On Siteground the storage showed that the inbox was half full but on going to the inbox there was nothing there. The Gmail account has the option to link other email accounts to it. Which we have done with the shop email.

Bit confused about how this Siteground figures... do you access your emails through them for some reason? If the underlying email server is Gmail, can't you just log on to Gmail directly? If it's a question of storage space, we pay Google a pittance (think it's £1.50/month/user or something) for 100Gb storage which in email terms is basically infinite so never need to worry about running out of space!

Left field idea - have you set up any rules to move emails from the inbox to another folder. I only ask because at my wife's tennis club someone had set a rule (by accident) to move emails to a folder on their local device and delete the original one! They were using Outlook as their client, but it is worth checking that no one has done something similar of any/all of the devices that access the emails.

(Personally I think it is a POP issue!)

I suspect OP has an email account at siteground and this links to gmail. Siteground have much harsher quotas than gmail and may have auto-pruned. I can probably confirm this with an MX lookup @zilog6128 if you are happy to disclose email address to me. I can maybe help a bit with Siteground as an organisation I help run has its email done via SG and I took over it recently.

I can probably confirm this with an MX lookup

Have you tried webmail in a browser?

This

If you open a web browser, go to http://www.gmail.com and log in – are there emails?

This

Get thee to a browser to check

This

As Cougar has said, log into your gmail in a browser rather than on an app

OP: 😶

This

🤣

First thing I did was log in on the Mac and it said primary email is empty.

^ on the Mac’s Mail app or via the browser/webmail ie gmail website mail.google.com?

Logged into Google account via safari.

So is anything showing in the All Mail or Deleted folder?

HAve you considered the possibility that you have completed the internet and you have been returned to level 1?

🤣