Why doesn't the Gmail app delete my e-mails permanently?

Question

Android 2.2 on an LG GT540. If I delete an email from my inbox in the default Gmail application then the email is in the trash, OK. But why isn't there any options to delete the e-mail from my trash?

Is it a security feature or what?

Answer 1

If you check this post and the answer by Google employee : http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Mobile/thread?tid=61ec816cf6ebd668&hl=en , its known limitation rather than a security feature.

The alternative as per this post by Osky: http://www.google.ru/support/forum/p/Google+Mobile/thread?tid=2f07884f917d86eb&hl=en

This is a known limitation. There are a couple of ways around it depending on what you seek to achieve:

1. Logon from your browser and select delete forever from the web app.

2. Don’t sync the Deleted items label

I’ve chosen the second option but on the other hand I very rarely delete and am not that affected by this curious lack of feature.

Thing is that trashed mails should be deleted after 30 days, and since I selected to only sync 4 days worth of garbage it should only be present in the cloud for 26 of those days.

To sum it up, the trash function is flawed. If it’s a viable option for you, you can chose not to sync that label and messages that you delete from trash will not show up again on your phone.

See Eth@n from Google comment on it in the referenced thread, looks like we can hope for the future :)