Gmail messages disappearing

New to smartphones, have the Tbolt. For several days my gmail was showing up just fine. Today it would load, but before I could touch a message, the entire list would disappear. I mean, literally disappear while I was staring at the phone, without me touching the screen. This seems to be a Gmail problem because it wasn't happening with the my Exchange account. It was occurring in both the Gmail app and the regular mail app. In settings, I have the "delete from server" UNCHECKED. I went in and UNCHECKED the setting for "sync deleted items" but that didn't solve the problem. So finally I just disabled all syncing in the Gmail app, and dragged it to the trashcan. The mail app seems mostly happy now, except that while I was downloading an email with a picture attachment today, it seems that the email was deleted from the server before the attachment was downloaded.

Also, the emails are not downloading to my Outlook anymore.

Sooooo it seems that the problem is related to the emails being deleted from the server, no matter what settings I have checked.

Can anyone help? FWIW, I've had the phone for a week, and this only started happening this morning without me changing any settings on the phone or in Gmail online.