Throwaway because I work at Google (but not on Gmail) and don't want to associate any of my HN posts with anything even remotely related (as a matter of persona

Throwaway because I work at Google (but not on Gmail) and don't want to associate any of my HN posts with anything even remotely related (as a matter of personal policy). That said, you're out of luck. Google has pretty strict data policies, and if a user deletes some their data (e.g. an email), it's my understanding that we're required to purge it from our all our systems (with maybe a couple months or so of leeway since we've got a lot of users and a lot of data). After a couple years of being deleted? Yeah, that email is gone. Forever.