This experience is of particular relevance to members of this forum.

I won't go into specifics at this stage for good reason, but yesterday I found that Gmail had deleted several emails (sent & received) that included the word 'firearms'.

I knew they existed and wanted to check the content of one but after considerable time spent searching (including trash and spam), they were no where to be found.  This indicated to me that they had been removed without my consent as I certainly hadn't deleted them.

Luckily, Google has a recovery tool and I was able to get them back and save them as documents plus forward them to an alternative email server.  However, this tool can only recover emails up to 30 days old, so anything after that will be gone for good.

My other half has been warning me about Gmail for some time now and I've been very skeptical - but no longer!  

I've now changed to a secure alternative called Proton Mail which you can set up to automatically receive emails sent to your Gmail address before it's deleted.  This happened today. A query sent to the receiver of the previously deleted emails responded and I found it in Proton Mail, but it had already been deleted from Gmail which was the address I had used.

Be warned!