All my emails got deleted

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Now, back to your problem. You said all three accounts are GMAIL.

• If any of those GMAIL accounts are part of a system that is administered or operated by a school or business, there may be an additional 30 days (which does not exist for individual user accounts) where the server admin can recover deleted (with trash emptied) GMAIL emails. But that option only exists for institutional GMAIL accounts.
• It sounds from your posts that you deleted the emails from within the Apple Mail app. If that is the case, those emails will have been backed up by Time Machine (or other backups tools like Carbon Copy Cloner, SuperDuper, etc.) in backups that were done PRIOR to this unfortunate incident. For instance, if you deleted the emails on October 8, your backups done on dates BEFORE October 8 will have all those emails. The folder that you want to recover from your backup is in the USER Library (not system Library) and that folder is called the Mail folder. Inside that Mail folder you will see some folders with names like V10, V9 ... you will want the highest numbered one (on my Tahoe MacBook Pro it is V10). Then inside that folder are some folders with long names comprised of letters and numbers. Open each one in turn, look for something like [GMAIL] among the names of their contents, if you see that, it has one of your GMAIL accounts. Since you said you have three GMAIL accounts, I expect you will find 3 such folders containing [GMAIL] items.

The first thing to try is simply to restore from the backup that entire Mail folder that is inside your USER Library. Make a copy of the existing Mail folder and place it somewhere safe (like the Desktop) before overwriting it. You may have lost the pointers to individual emails in doing this, but you can rebuild those mailboxes (an option inside Apple Mail), or, worst case, you can simply "import" into Apple Mail each of those three folders that include your GMAIL account emails. You may have some housecleaning to do to get things back the way they looked before, but all your emails will be there inside a backup done prior to the big email erasures.

I sincerely hope you have good and reliable backups. If you do not, then that would in and of itself be a serious blunder, but it is water under the bridge; in that case, obviously what I suggest above won't work when there is no backup. I think your only option without any backups would be to pursue this with Google. I read that they have some limited means to SOMETIMES recover such emails after the email trash was emptied by the user but they only utilize it when the user's account was broken into by a third party. That said, it does not hurt to ask. It sounds like you are already in contact with them.

What type of email?

If it is iCloud email, then if the messages were placed in the Trash and it was emptied, according to Apple those messages are permanently deleted and cannot be recovered. That said, log in to iCloud and check, just in case. If none are there, Apple's only suggestion is to ask people to resend those emails to you. Obviously not a solution in your case with a thousand emails. Apple also says that local backups do not include iCloud emails.

One way (there are several) to back up iCloud emails is to export them to an Apple Mail On My Mac mailbox. If that was done, those local emails would be backed up in Time Machine or other types of backups. Did you ever export your iCloud emails?

If your emails were of the IMAP or MS-Exchange type, including GMAIL, or if they were POP email, then there might be a policy for restoring deleted emails within a certain time period -- check with your email provider. These emails would be backed up in your Time Machine or other backups if you read them on your Mac with an email reader such as Apple Mail. The folder where they physically are stored is in your user Library (not the System Library) inside the Mail folder. Restoring that Mail folder in its entirety from a backup made when the emails were in there would restore them all.

I don't know how this happened, as every day millions of email users (including me) delete scores of emails successfully. I can only guess that you somehow inadvertently selected the entire In Box contents when you meant to select only specific items inside it? This can happen when the box at the top of the email listing is selected because it then selects all emails below it in that listing.

Sopholmes23 wrote:

Thank you for your responses, they have been genuinely very helpful. I'm sorry I did not acknowlege that fact in my earlier reply.

I unfortunately did not have a backup set up. Yes, this is a "blunder". I see now why these things are so valuable, even when stay at home moms such as me only ever use their computers to play dungeons and dragons, write books in their notes app, and watch the occasional youtube video. I am not techy. Though I feel I deserve a MEDAL after what I went through to recover my emails with Google, which I did follow through on - some of my emails have been recovered and I downloaded a file recovery software in hopes of recovering the rest.

Sorry about the lack of backup. Also, note that these backups are not just to guard against a bug in an app (or a user error); they also protect you against hardware failure, which will eventually happen to every piece of hardware, it's a matter of when, not if.

Using GMAIL, however, does protect you at some level because the emails are stored on the GMAIL server, so if your computer failed they would still be there to download to a new computer. The problem here is that when you emptied the trash, that deletes them from everywhere.

One sort of hail Mary possibility -- if you have another device (like an iPad, or another computer) that has been OFF during this time period, it would still have a physical copy those deleted emails. They won't be removed until it is powered on. So you could turn off your internet, turn on that device, disconnect it from WiFi and the internet, and keep it disconnected when you turn back on your internet. Then on that device, which is offline, you can move, store, export, or locally store all those emails before connecting it to the internet again. The emails would have been rescued. I do have an old laptop that I use only as a "beater" when we travel, and this hail Mary would have worked for me in this situation. Not sure if it helps you, however.

If this is a gmail account, log into your email using the google webmail page. Your email may still be on their server.

I can't imagine why it would be Apple's responsibility to warn a Google email account user that they are about to delete their Google emails.

Sopholmes23 wrote:

Your response is actually not even helpful AT ALL, as the last one covered your suggestion already - yours is snarky for the sake of being snarky.

Sorry. Best of luck going forward.