I had a long conversation going with someone on gmail and I wanted to find it and it's gone!

[Maraya1969]

Can the other person delete from their end and it all gets deleted? I've looked in inbox, sent mail, and trash and I cannot find the damn thing. It contains information that I really need.

Thanks in advance to anyone.

[teach1st]

1. Once mail is delivered to your account

Once email is delivered to your Google account, nobody else can delete it unless they have access to your account. If the sender deletes the conversation on his or her end, it doesn't affect the conversation that's been delivered to your account.

Have you tried searching Gmail for that discussion? Search for the email address of the person you've been talking to.

Edit: You wrote that you've "looked in inbox, sent mail, and trash." Have you looked in the spam folder?

[Maraya1969]

3. I just realized that the first few back and forths between us are missing. The last 3 are still

there. This is weird.

[TreasonousBastard]

2. There are a lot of ways mail can be deleted from servers, and not...

always deliberately.

I use Thunderbird to download mail from 5 email accounts to my computer where it is saved sort of forever. But, if I delete an email on my computer, I unknowingly set things up so it also gets deleted from the server. That's fine, since it cleans up the servers, but kind of a shock if you don't expect it.

Did you check your spam filters? Might have accidentally found their way there. Could you ask the other person to resend the emails if they still have them?

And check out Thunderbird, you might find it useful--- https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird

[Maraya1969]

4. I checked spam and I found the last 3 off the emails. It looks like they were just cut off.

[NYC_SKP]

5. Likewise, I use Sea Monkey because you can't trust the cloud.

My work depends on emails, I have a few accounts and have used Yahoo mail for much of my work, but they once "lost" everything and screamed bloody murder and had things restored, but consider that lucky.

Thunderbird and Sea Monkey mail applications save to your computer.

It's a wise thing to do.

[TreasonousBastard]

6. "Can't trust the cloud"...

so true.

I have plenty of stuff on Dropbox and others for convenience, but would never leave everything there without backup here at home.

[hobbit709]

7. And then I use MozBackup once a week to make a backup file

I can completely restore my profiles in Firefox, SeaMonkey, and Thunderbird in just a few minutres
Or it makes it real easy to migrate to new computer.