Gmail – Can emails be received to a deleted Gmail account

There are several levels of "delete" and you'd need to ask Google how far they went when you pressed the "delete" button.

1. The file (for that's what a mail message actually is) is moved from your inbox to a "trash" folder in your account. This removes it from your inbox but you can still recover it quite easily.
2. The file is completely removed from your account. In this case it might still exist somewhere on the Gmail servers but you'd have to contact Google for it to be restored. I don't know whether this is the case, but it's a reasonable assumption.
3. The file is removed from the Gmail servers. In this case it might have been backed up before deletion.
4. The file is removed from all backups. In this case the mail has, to all intents and purposes gone.

This doesn't cover the use of forensic data recovery to analyse the hard drive of the server to recover a deleted file - but with the volume of data passing through Gmail I'd assume that any deleted file would get overwritten quite quickly.

You can obviously create a label and mark it as don't delete. But the problem with accidents is that they happen when we forget to include the label.

The only absolute way of preventing from deleting accidentally in Gmail for now, is to follow two mail box approach. I have created another email address which I never give it to anyone. Any emails that I want to keep safe, I forward them to the other secret email address.

Only accident proof approach for now. Please don't ask if you forgot to send the email to this other account.