Sure. I logged into gmail.com yesterday morning, and my inbox was missing. I still had everything that "skips the inbox", like mailing lists, my sent mail was all there, but everything that was in by inbox had vanished.
That is sad. Do you use POP or IMAP with GMail? And do you see anything weird in the "Last Account Activity" link at the bottom of the page?
Also, were the messages merely archived (i.e., moved from Inbox to All Mail), or were they completely deleted (i.e., you can't even find them via the search box)?
No, no strange activity in that window. I see myself coming out of Black Rock City, and the sparse signal I was getting on Monday as a result of it, but other than that it's just my office.
This actually sounds more like your account got hijacked, or the screen was left up and someone deleted the inbox messages. Try this process to recover messages from the trash: http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...
Can you check for unusual forwarding rules or delegation in settings? As a follow-up, do you use two-factor authentication on this Gmail account?
I didn't use two factor before, but am now. The password I was using was unique, though, and also fairly complex, so I find it unlikely somebody brute forced it.
I tried the link you're suggesting, as well as looking through the trash etc. What seemed very odd to me was that the messages which started in my inbox were missing from he trash, but things that were "skip the inbox" weren't.
Meaning anything I had "trashed" before yesterday was intact.
Again this seems to suggest that the account wasn't compromised, but that I fell victim to some sort of bug. It would have to be a very strange/determined hacker to go through and move my inbox to trash, then go to trash and only remove messages that started in the inbox.
Regarding the messages that used to be in your inbox -- are they gone gone, like you can't even search for them, even with the in:anywhere flag that makes GMail check Spam and Trash?
Is it possible that you accidentally typed *a# into a GMail window? Those are the keyboard shortcuts for "select all" and "move to trash".
Fear of doing that sort of thing has led me to disable GMail keyboard shortcuts altogether on my account. (To do that, press ? in a GMail window and click the link on the second line of the overlay window.)
Yesterday was some very odd behavior, so I must have missed them in the morning.
Basically:
1) I logged into gmail, and saw only one email that I had gotten that morning, everything else was gone. I looked in trash, and the things in it were from over a week ago [I've been out of town at Burning Man for the last week], so things hadn't just been moved to trash.
2) Did the "recover deleted messages" request via google, and a few hours got a response that some things should be restored to "All Mail", but still didn't see much.
:(
This actually made me pretty sad.