It is great to be in the cloud

If you ever decide to cleanup your gmail and permanently delete messages from your trash maybe you will be interested to make backup of your emails first.
The free solution which worked the best for me is from mailstore.com
It is windows only but it worked great.
After making full backup of my mailbox I was able to delete any number of messages and then individually or bulk restore them back without any problem.
(it will place them in a restored folder in you gmail and then you can move them back to your inbox)
Other possible solutions for gmail backup are listed here: http://techsplurge.com/3250/5-ways-backup-gmail/