When Jeneane Sessum logged into her Gmail account on the afternoon of Oct. 27,
she was greeted with a horrifying sight: an empty inbox.

A Gmail user since 2004, Sessum, a social media consultant and writer in Atlanta,
had thousands of messages there, enough to use up almost 30 percent of her allotted
storage space.

Since Gmail is her primary work and personal e-mail service, Sessum lost many
important messages, including some she needed at that moment for a project.

Days earlier in Chicago, Jessica Squazzo, a writer and editor, accessed Gmail
and stared at her computer screen in disbelief: All messages from 2007 had disappeared
from her inbox.

Sessum and Squazzo are just two of a small but steady stream of Gmail users
who regularly report losing some, many, or all of their messages without a clue
as to why.

It seems that hardly a week goes by without at least several users reporting
this problem on discussion boards, such as the official Gmail
Help forum.

Asked to comment about multiple lost-message reports in 11 different threads
created in September and October in the Gmail Help forum, a Google spokesman
declined to address any of the specific situations, citing privacy reasons.

However, he did emphasize that, as far as Google is concerned, "most issues
like this are a result of phishing attacks or compromised passwords -- or sometimes
simply messages mistakenly deleted or marked as spam -- not a data corruption
issue."

That explanation makes little sense to savvy and experienced Internet users
like Sessum and Squazzo, who are aware of phishing scams and know better than
to reply to suspicious messages -- let alone include in them confidential, sensitive
information, such as passwords. In addition, they say they are the only ones
with access to their respective accounts.

Moreover, both Sessum and Squazzo, interviewed separately via e-mail, question
why a malicious hacker would go through the trouble of trying to access someone's
e-mail account in order to delete messages, instead of acting stealthily to
harvest information they could exploit, like credit card numbers.

"If someone had hacked into my account, why would they have just erased
some of my e-mail and not all? The fact that precisely all my e-mail from 2007
-- and no earlier mail -- was wiped out leads me to still conclude that it must
have been some technical error on Gmail's servers, whether they want to admit
that or not," said Squazzo, who has used Gmail for personal communications
since 2005.

In the case of Sessum, while the inbox was empty, she still had copies of messages
she had sent in the "All Mail" file of her account, along with saved
transcripts of instant messaging chats

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