By default, Gmail does not automatically delete emails. Therefore, if you find that your sent emails are disappearing, the issue may be caused by a third-party add-on or a setting within Gmail that you unknowingly altered.
In this article, I’ll outline six potential reasons why this might be happening, and provide you with some tips on how to address the issue.
1 – Misconfigured IMAP and POP Settings
If you have IMAP or POP active then you may have configured the setting incorrectly which is causing Gmail to delete or move emails from your inbox.
To rule this out as a possibility, follow the following steps.
1 – Navigate to your Gmail inbox and click on the gear icon in the top right corner of the page.
2 – Click the “See all settings” button from the dropdown menu.
3 – Go to the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” tab.
4 – If you have POP enabled, ensure that the “When messages are accessed with POP” option is set to “Keep Gmail’s copy in the Inbox.”
5 – If you have IMAP enabled, ensure that the “When I mark a message in IMAP as deleted” option is set to “Auto-Expunge on,” and the “When a message is marked as deleted and expunged from the last visible IMAP folder” is set to “Archive this message.”
2 – Misconfigured Filters
If you use the filters feature in Gmail, you may have configured one to delete your sent messages. To check whether a filter is causing the issue, follow these steps:
1 – Go to your Gmail inbox and click on the gear icon.
2 – Click the “See all settings” button from the dropdown menu.
3 – Navigate to the “Filters and blocked addresses” tab.
4 – You can either disable all of your filters or review them to see if any are set to delete emails.
3 – Check the setting of your email client
Third-party email clients often have their own settings for handling emails, which can potentially affect how Gmail treats your sent messages.
For example, Mozilla Thunderbird and other clients can be configured using IMAP or POP3. if you choose the POP3 option during setup, all emails will be stored on your local device.
Therefore, any sent emails you compose using this third-party email client will not appear on the Gmail web or mobile apps; you will only be able to access them through that client.
To avoid this issue, ensure that the third-party email client that you use is configured correctly and set to synchronize your sent messages with your Gmail account.
4 – A third Party extension is deleting your emails
Third-party add-ons may have settings that override Gmail’s default behavior, potentially causing your sent messages to be deleted.
If you have any of these add-ons connected to your Gmail account, try uninstalling them to see if the issue is resolved.
To uninstall add-ons in Gmail, follow these steps:
1 – From your Gmail inbox, click on the gear icon in the top right corner of the page.
2 – Click on the “See all settings” button from the dropdown menu
3 – Navigate to the “Add-ons” tab.
4 – Click on the “Manage” link
5 – Look for the installed add-on you want to remove and click on the vertical ellipsis icon in the top right corner of the add-on box.
6 – Click on the “uninstall” button.
7 – In the confirmation box, click on the “uninstall app” button to remove the add-on.
8 – Repeat steps five, six and seven for the remaining add-ons.
5 – You Are probably viewing only one page out of many
It’s easy to overlook the fact that Gmail displays sent emails across multiple pages. Make sure you’re not just viewing the first page of sent emails, as this could be why you think emails are being deleted.
Here are the steps to navigate to other pages of sent emails:
1 – Go to the “Sent” label in your Gmail inbox.
2 – Locate the arrow icons at the top right of the page and click on the arrow that is pointing to the right to view sent emails on the other page.
6 – You may have deleted the original email thread
Gmail only stores one copy of an email and filters it into different labels such as sent or archive.
If you delete an email you replied to from your inbox, all labels that are attached to it including the sent label will be removed and replaced with the trash label. Once in the trash, the email thread will be permanently deleted after 30 days.
However, if it has not been 30 days yet, you can go to your trash folder and move the email thread back to your inbox to recover your sent email.
