Google takes out your garbage for you!

It seems Gmail decided to take out the garbage - forcibly. :(

I normally access email thru POP3.
Logged into Gmail webUI today, and imagine my shock when I suddenly found I was using far less space than I remember having used the last time (it'd been 2 months since I logged into web-interface).
The previous time, I had been using like 1200-odd MB of space, out of 2650 MB. And today it showed only 250 MB as "occupied" space.
The first thought was, does mail in "trash" not count towards your mailbox anymore?

But the nightmare was yet to come.
I looked at some new mails in the Inbox, then went to the trash folder..... where I saw.... NOTHING !!!!!!!!!!
WTF ??
It had all my mails that I ever received - right since August 2004. I had left them in there, as Gmail did not seem to empty the trash automatically. Many of the super-ancient mails in there were mails that I'd wanted to look into, at some point in the future. But they decided to empty out a year-and-a-half's worth of treasures without even notifying me about the step! My 32,000 mails - GONE!!!!!


Further blog-postings about this:
Gmail deletes trash
Google does some cleaning with Gmail mailboxes