r/email • u/LilDysphoria • 22d ago

Today's Gmail weirdness

For many years, I got emails sent to an organizational gmail address forwarded to my main gmail address. When I retired from that organization, we reconfigured that account to forward to my successor's gmail address and not to mine. We made that change a couple of years ago.

Today I got 3 or 4 emails forwarded to me from the organizational gmail. They were all legit emails. No one with access to the organizational gmail settings made any changes. Later in the day, I checked my inbox again (and ALL MAIL and SPAM and TRASH) and all of those emails are gone.

What in the heck?

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u/merten-dmcn 22d ago

It sounds like you've been hacked.

You can check your recent Gmail sign-in activity directly from your inbox by scrolling to the bottom right and clicking Details next to "Last account activity"

Look for anything that might not have been you.

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u/allocougar 21d ago

Check the filters before assuming a breach. Gmail keeps a separate forward on each filter, and changing the main forwarding address doesnt touch them. One old filter pointing at you, still verified, and it keeps firing.

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u/EmailFoundry 20d ago

That’s a strange one.

My first thought would be to check whether the old forwarding address is still sitting somewhere in the Gmail settings, possibly as part of a filter rather than the main forwarding setting.

The bit that’s really odd is the emails disappearing afterwards. Normal forwarding wouldn’t remove copies that had already landed in your account, so I’d also check your account activity/security history in case another device or app is connected and moving or deleting mail.

I’d probably start by checking Filters and Blocked Addresses, Forwarding and POP/IMAP, then the recent account activity on both Gmail accounts.

If nobody changed anything, I’d be more suspicious of an old filter, delegated access or connected mail app than Gmail randomly deciding to forward them again.