If you use the Gmail app on your iPhone or iPad, it might be sensible to check your Trash and Spam folders before Valentine’s Day.
That’s not because there might be an ecard waiting for you from a secret admirer, but due to Google accidentally deleting or marking as spam some users’ messages.
Important Notice
You may have been impacted by a recent issue in Gmail that inadvertently caused some actions (e.g, delete, report spam) taken while viewing a message to be applied to a different message. The issue occurred between January 15 and January 22 and is now fixed.
We encourage you to check your Trash and Spam folders before February 14, 2014 for any items you did not intend to delete or mark as spam and move them back to your inbox. We apologize for any inconvenience.
According to a report in The Verge, Google says the bug was introduced during a software update on a few platforms – its iOS app, mobile browsers and the offline version of Gmail – and not all users are affected by it.
Nonetheless, if I were using the Gmail smartphone app I’d probably want to spend a few minutes checking my spam and trash folders just in case I was one of the unlucky victims of this software bug.
At the end of last week there was enormous furore when Gmail and Google Plus went offline for a few hours. However, it seems to me that accidental deletion of emails is a much more serious problem than temporary downtime.
If I were a user of the Gmail iOS app, I’d probably want to check my spam and trash folders for unexpected messages sooner rather than later.
