gmail weirdness

May 7, 2018 4:20 PM

Why does a single gmail message not show up in my inbox on my macbook air, but does show up in "All mail" (and on my iphone?)

This has happened a couple of times.
1. I notice a gmail come in on my iphone.
2. Later I open gmall on my macbook air. All the messages that were on my iphone gmail app are also there in the inbox except for this one.
3. Because I know it arrived on my iphone and do not see it in my laptox inbox, I click "All Mail" on teh laptop. It is indeed there in All Mail.. but while every other note has the designation "Inbox," this one has *no* designated mailbox. The subject line simply takes up the whole line, there is no place such as "inbox" or "sent."
4. It is still on my iphone.
5. Other messages that have been opened on my iphone app first DO show up on the macbook inbox. There is no way to distinguish this from others.
6. If I had not seen it come in on my iphone, I would not know, from the laptop, that it had arrived. I usually check gmail on my laptop.
I am NOT looking for solutions to sort through my mail to find missing messages, rather I am looking for a reason that this seemingly arbitrary thing happens sometimes so I can fix it.
Thanks!

posted by flourpot to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Check your sorting rules and change your password. This sort of thing is how I found out that someone had hacked my Gmail account, set up rules to make eBay emails automatically bypass my inbox, then buy a bunch of stuff on eBay and ship it to not-my-address.
posted by Etrigan at 4:51 PM on May 7, 2018 [2 favorites]

Yes, check all the filters and rules you have set up. Earlier this year somehow I set up a rule for all emails from myself to myself to bypass the inbox, which was a problem because that's how I remember anything I need to do later.
posted by peanut_mcgillicuty at 5:52 PM on May 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

As others have said, this behavior is consistent with things skipping the inbox for some reason or another. Any message that is “Archived” for whatever reason will lose its Inbox tag. One possibility is that someone has hacked your account, so check that out first. Another possibility is that you’re inadvertently clicking the Archive button in iOS Mail. That button is right in the middle of the buttons along the bottom of the screen. When I push it, it does ask me to confirm, but I could definitely seeing an occasional inadvertent double tap when scrolling through the message.
posted by Betelgeuse at 6:19 PM on May 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

This happened to me once. I figured out that in my case, the rogue message was a reply to an email I had sent from an iOS device using the share sheet from the Notes app. I was just emailing the whole contents of a list I had made in Notes. I don't do this often, so I didn't realize that (at least on whichever iOS thing I used, not sure if it was iPad or phone) messages sent by email from the share sheet are sent from your iCloud email and not from your main email account on the device, in my case Gmail. So All Mail on my phone is Gmail + iCloud, Inbox is only Gmail, and I've just never used iCloud except this once by mistake.
posted by clavicle at 9:39 AM on May 8, 2018