Why did many of my emails suddenly disappear today and how do I restore them?!!
I have an iPhone XS, a Macbook air, iPad Air and an iMac. I use the apple mail app with google mail as the default. All devices are synced.
I have created several hundred google email folders containing ~28,000 emails as of this morning. At least I think that's how many I had because this morning I noticed for the first time ever while checking email on the MBA that there was a message in the bottom left hand corner of my inbox saying that 27,000 emails were being "downloaded".
I was stunned. I had no idea why this was happening. I hit pause once or twice not knowing what to do, why this was occurring and why so many emails were being downloaded. Never noticed this before.
Confused as heck, I went into the Important and Archive folders, which I never do, and saw they were mirror images of each other, each containing 28,000 emails. That was bizarre because I never set up Important to receive all my emails, and they never used to be mirror images on one another. Don't know when Important imported all my emails. I didn't need the duplication, so in the Important folder, I did "select all" and then delete. Nothing else. Left Archive folder emails alone.
Later this afternoon, I went to reply to an email on my iPad Air which came in early this morning but it had vanished! I then noticed that lots of other emails in my inbox were missing, too. But worst of all, I noticed lots of emails were missing from my numerous folders. Yikes!!!!!!! I need those, especially the confirmation emails from hotels, airlines, etc for upcoming travel.
Went to the iMac and MBA and the emails were missing there, too.
Interestingly, I just checked my iPhone and went into some of my email folders and as soon as I did, I saw that the emails were there but within a second, they were deleted! Why??? I'm afraid to check other email folders on my phone, hoping they still have the missing emails so I can stop them from being deleted and have them restored on all my other devices.
Did the google recovery program which restored maybe 10,000 emails. (As part of that, I had to change my 35 character password. Can't believe it was hacked.) I'm now back up to 13,000 emails but many are still missing from my folders.
Went into Time Machine and went back to a time this morning and hit "restore" but that did nothing.
Lord have mercy. What do I have to do to get my missing emails back??? And why on earth did they vanish.
I'm panic stricken and need help desperately.
I'm a tech moron so please use kindergarten language to help me. Thank you.
iMac 27″ 5K, macOS 11.6