Gmail disappeared

[Aairman23]

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?