That’s it. Just like that. One morning you wake up to find most of your emails emptied, gone, vanished - never to be retrieved again.

Well, that just happened to me. But what happened really?

A happy Yahoo! Mail Plus customer since February 2003 - a full five years of my personal emails dissolved into thin air this past week.

A moment of panic ensued. Then I started thinking.

The good news: I discovered that Yahoo! has a toll-free number to call (still relatively untypical for a .com), their customer service rep was exceedingly helpful and to-the-point, without schmoozie upselling attempts and just a minimum number of subservient “we-love-you-Mr.-Customer”.

And yes, I did get my follow-up call the same evening, just as promised.

The bad news: In a heartbeat Yahoo! (accidentally?) removed a full five years of my personal email communications with friends, family and many other folks I care about - only to confirm Yahoo! had forever deleted thousands of my digital messages off their server farms.

To me, that real question behind this unexpected personal data kill: In our hyper-social, interconnected world, what role does our email communication really represent within our personal sphere?

Certainly not as direct and personable as a one-on-one phone call, email is faster to-and-fro sender and recipient than, let’s say, a letter or a fax.

Conversely, email lags the speed of instant messaging and typically is slower than a briefly “spit-out” Twitter-style micro-blog post.

Of course email is searchable. In fact, Yahoo!’s recent free browser update improved my ability to turn scant bits of memory (… didn’t what’s-her-name’s email mention “engagement ads”?) into a series of (mostly relevant) hits.

Try that with past voice mails , letters or faxes received. It will not work.

But did I hold on to years of emails because I really needed to, or simply because I could? 

And what meaning do personal emails occupy in my daily life in terms of actual productivity gains?

Pushed by Google’s competitive Gmail launch, in May of last year, Yahoo! responded by offering “unlimited email storage” capabilities.

At one fell swoop, I was confronted with the pleasures of an all-you-can-eat email depository.

But just because competition got tough on Yahoo!, and storage cost had fallen dramatically, doesn’t really mean myself (or most anyone) actually needed the extra space and ensuing clutter.

Leaves my postmortem analysis with the legal aspect of my involuntary email vanishing act.

In short, a look inside Yahoo!’s service agreement failed to provide detail into the liability aspect of emails lost. (Do I actually have recourse here?).

But then again, it’s too late anyway.

What’s gone is gone, forever in the heavens of the Internet ether.