Worried of Epsom

Doing my early morning check of my email in gmail, I noticed that most of the older emails which should have been sitting in the social and promotions tabs had gone missing. All rather alarming because although it might be a free-at-point-of-use service over which one has no control, one does come to rely on it working. Which very nearly all the time it does - altogether an impressive bit of software engineering.

So I ask Bing about missing emails in gmail and it turns up various stuff, including reference 1. Which tells me about the gear icon top right, and which, taking a page from Microsoft's iconography, turns out to give one access to all kinds of geeky controls for one's email, that is to say one's settings. A place which I had never visited before.

A quick and untutored look does not reveal anything untoward and I come out, without having done anything.

But the missing emails in the social and promotions tabs now seem to have been reinstated. Which will do for now, but it does reduce trust in the system.

PS: a next step would have been to logout and login again. And if that did not work, to restart the laptop and try again. And if that did not work, to try the desktop downstairs. But it did not come to that.

Reference 1: https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-recover-missing-emails-gmail-4585081.