Intro and technical issue

First, greetings everyone I'm Mo :wave
I've been a fan of this site for a few years now and never had to ask a question for technical issues because I was able to find the solution until now.

I guess it's more of a question to get info than technical advice.

I went to bed right after checking my emails and woke up at around 9ish to see a bunch of emails sent from my address to my contacts (spoofing or joeing as I've seen it referred to) as rejected. How can I find out the true sender of those emails or is it a lost cause? I know it's a silly question but I'm really curious because I discovered one email "vanished"...without a trace. The email was between me and a guy I've been talking to for about a month now. I searched all over for this friggin email - all mail, sent mail, trash...nada! And another email with correspondence to a different guy was tossed in the trash.

My trash can has about 200 messages I've deleted over the past few weeks so emptying my trash to dispose of that one email would've been noticeable. I even contacted Google to retrieve this email...they were unable to retrieve it. I tried searching the ip addresses in the messages but no luck.

And this guy just so happens to work in computers (IT) and it gets more interesting because he works in the law enforcement dept.

Had it just been some rejected emails from contacts without missing emails...1 email, probably would've just shrugged it off as a random anonymous spammer (I activated the verification process shortly after fixing my account issues though). The wipe out of one single email, along with trashing another one sounds a little too specific. And the reason I think its personal is because I made a blog entry about a guy I was having a relationship with just ended, it wasn't a serious relationship and I never hid that from anyone interested in me that I'm dating around. The same guy...is also the moderator for the website so he can easily look at my entries and see I date/meet new guys.

So...is it possible to do that? And how in the world did that email just...disappear??? :confused
I emailed him about it to see what he says...but in a "I'm clueless twirling my hair around my finger while looking vacant" tone :-D

My account hasn't been closed on that site because it would've been a definite clue as to who did it. And any help/advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

 

What was in the emails sent to your contacts?
How do you know that this person works in IT and law enforcement? Have you verify the information?
If he was a moderator of a site and the email was on that site, then it could be discarded.
I know of others that gave out their personal emails to people on dating sites and then become infected with spyware on their computer. Have you check your computer for spyware?

 

The email was a link for a website (obviously I didn't click on it). Because he told me that's what he does for a living and no I haven't had any reason to try to verify this since I've never had this happen. Nor am I the type to run checks on everybody I meet on or offline since the only thing we've done was exchange messages.

The email was through Gmail which I had mentioned in my original post, I tried contacting them to retrieve it but they weren't able to. So it was my personal email not the website that my account was hacked. And this is on my phone (S Galaxy II) and yes I've scanned my phone and nothing came up and even with spyware I've never heard of spyware singling out an email to delete - I've heard of emails disappearing but normally that tends to be multiple emails.

 

Unless one gained remote access to your computer though keylogging software which most AV software will miss picking up, it would be difficult.

 

The email headers always contain the originating IP address; this is one thing that cannot be forged.