I have had Gmail running perfectly for years and a couple of days ago, it just disappeared from my messaging account. When I try to set up a new account it says that an account already exists with that name. I've read that a way around this is to slightly change the account name for examle change it from "gmail" to "google"; that works fine, but my mail box now always says that I have 4 unread messages from the "old" (and lost) account. I can't access that acount anymore to earase those emails (so they never go away). Hard reset works, but I really don't want to start from scratch and my latest sprite back up file only brings me to the same problem. Anybody have any ideas?

This happened to me once during a restore from a Sprite backup - i chose the messaging settings but didnt choose the system state so i had gmail messages without a gmail account. I had to hard reset to fix it, unfortunately.