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Gmail Accidentally Resets 150,000 Accounts
tsj5j writes "Many users have reported loss of their Gmail accounts, as they signed in to find their email accounts reset — losing years of email history. This appears to be a result of a bug which treats existing owners as new users. For those affected, Google is currently trying to resolve the problem. For the rest of us, perhaps this is a timely reminder to backup our data and be less trusting of the cloud."
Oh, how I want to tag this story gfail.
This is *exactly* why I have my Gmail account linked to Thunderbird via IMAP and I perform regular backups.
jdb2
Imagine having a transcript of your emails in a web site like livedash.com ... just imagine !
At least, I wouldn't then have to clean it.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
I mean, even its name is vaporous.
There is only one person in the world who values my data enough to protect it properly, and that person is me.
Yay cloud.
A stand-alone application seems the safest way to go. Personally, I use MailStore (free home edition) to ensure a local backup of my Gmail mails.
I suspect offline access via Gears wouldn't help much in this case. It's supposed to stay in sync so I guess logging into an empty account would sync the local gears data into oblivion as well. The same would presumably be true of a local IMAP client (though that could at least be recovered from a backup and then opened in offline mode).
I demand my money back!
...and be less trusting of the cloud.
Sorry, can't. I don't trust it at all.
This is exactly why it's important to keep backups. Gmail Backup is a pretty straightforward way to back up your Gmail account. You can also use it to upload emails from one account into another.
While I still love my gmail account, I also know of so many stories of people close to me who have lost their gmail accounts due to some weird glitch or choice made by Google. Yet, I'm still a fan of the service and maintain mine. I just don't use it as my main account because I realize that any one time I can probably lose it. Whenever you rely on a service that requires trust in an entity that might not be there tomorrow, or has a tendency to do really weird things without first informing customers, you really have to be careful with what you're doing. That doesn't mean I have to hate gmail, but at the same time it means I'm a lot more careful when dealing with it.
Sarbonn's blog: http://www.sarbonn.com/blog
But it's so soft and fluffy and will cradle you in a cushion of customer service who will get you back up and running in no time! /humor
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
... Google has repeatedly said they could not guarantee that deleted mail was actually deleted. With such built-in redundancy everything should be back in order in no time.
I suspect this bug was avoidable. The thing with Google is they are learning what it's like when you abandon the policy of doing no evil. You lose sight of the important things like minimalism, reduction of bloat, and overall user satisfaction.
They are no longer reliable.
The replacement for Google will do the following:
1. Create stable search with minimalist reliable results, perhaps P2P generated.
2. Not cater to douchebags on the internet trying to get rich quick.
3. Supply secure/reliable minimalist email service.
4. Supply secure/reliable minimalist hosting service.
5. Supply secure/reliable minimalist discussion and social networking.
6. Supply secure/reliable products and services people want without commercial interruption. (this is the financial medium, business gurus)
7. Do no evil.
8. Be very wise about it all.
9. Be aware of the dangers and circumnavigate them well in advance.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
There is only one person in the world who values my data enough to protect it properly, and that person is me.
...And I don't eve trust that person to do it properly.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
There is only one person in the world who values my data enough to protect it properly, and that person is me.
Dam right. Trusting your email to a company who's main business is mining data can't be safe either. Having your data spread out over god knows how many countries and subject to the whims of who knows what government agencies doesn't sound like a good idea.
I run my own mail server and do nightly backups of my whole mailstore. Any decent linux admin should be able to setup a cheap virtual machine and a BackupPC server at home to do the same. In fact any decent linux admin should enjoy setting it up.
While there are not (as yet, as far as I've seen) any people yelling and shouting for heads to role because some of their precious data is lost, I expect it to start soon.
There are far too few people who understand the danger of having only one copy of information, and people seem even more naive when that copy is help by another party (they assume that someone else is dealing with it, and seem to expect there will be some sort of come-back if the service they pay nothing for loses some of their info).
I'm not sure how we'd go about it, but the general public really needs to be hit around the head with the clue-stick on the matter. It probably needs to start in schools. I'm pretty sure from talking to younger family and friends (the conversation usually starts with something like "my cheap USB stick isn't working, can you read my document off it for me?) that good backups is not something covered in IT lessons at school (or if it is taught, it isn't drummed in hard enough) and it should be.
People need a better appreciation of how many things can cause damage or loss of data, and how easy it can be to protect yourself from the worst side-effects of that damage/loss simply by looking after your information properly.
That's what THEY want you to think!
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
This is a bit of a worry, as I am considering moving a client over to google apps sometime eventually.
I myself have a LOT on my gmail I should probably backup but I do understand it's my responsibility, even though I don't have one at the moment.
I wonder if there's a simple sure fire way of grabbing the whole lot once every 3 months, anyone know a tool to do this?
Also since this is as good a place to ask as any, how many here have moved business' over to Google Apps for mail? I am considering doing so, but in my testing with Outlook 2003 the performance for latency,.. wasn't ideal - is there some local caching I can organise on my desktop to increase performance? or do Google app users just endure the speed issues?
Also, my real issue with google apps (besides price) is the way folders work, I need obscenely large folders for my clients unfortunately... yes it's an odd requirement but these people _live_ out of their email, all day long and have folders named like this.
Inbox \ Department \ Project #125 \ Customer Name \ Visa Process
Inbox \ Department \ Project #314 \ Customer Name \ Housing information
(You get the idea, really, really big folders) - IIRC Google mail / apps falls ass over when you try to use folders on it with imap (once folders get too big) - Wish I could just use 'normal folders' in this instance)
Agreed. I run Postfix and Dovecot on a remote VM and locally on my Snow Leopard box. Thunderbird POP3s everything from the remote VM to local Maildir and Dovecot serves it back to Thunderbird via IMAP. Add Time Machine and cycled offsite backups into the mix and my mail is pretty safe.
And what do you do when your house burns to the ground with both your cheap virtual machine and BackupPC? I'd say it would be quite nice to have yor data stored somewhere else in addition to your own private backup system. With that said, of course it does not have to be Google or another multi national corporation storing the data for you. Find someone and pay them for it. Then sue them if they do something bad with your data :)
This is horrible. Losing years of email because of some glitch in service provider is totally unacceptable. We demand an immediate refund of every cent we paid for our gmail service. And 100 times that as punitive damages. That will teach them to treat us with more dignity.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
...And I don't eve trust that person to do it properly.
After all, a simple typo can completely screw up the meaning of an automated backup script!
I am officially gone from
Or you could just encrypt your data before you upload it. Then they can't do anything with it, except possibly lose it, but that's a risk no matter what you do.
How good are they? Most very cheap VPS are extremely over subscribed...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Anyone using a solid and secure command line backup solution for linux? I run a headless server -- would be nice if I could securely backup all my emails there in the event of a catastrophe ... and only then fire up Thunderbird or the like and view them when needed. The only downside I have seen is the need to save my gmail password somewhere in cleartext -- which doesn't seem like a good idea.
Yes, only you have 100% alignment with your interests. But are you competent to backup and guard your data properly? Same thing with my house. But I would rather outsource my security to my local municipality and hire some private security monitoring firm for additional security. At some point cost benefit analysis should be done. Gmail's reliability is much better than what you would expect for a free service.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I want gmail to offer an image system, where by you ask to download an image (zipped of course) of the current state of your email folders and configs and all contacts, into a nicely zipped file. Then you can restore or backup using the notion as in VSS, which makes it very easy to maintain backups for individuals, especially those that do not want to wait long hours to use something crappy like outlook to manage their backups of emails. Also it would solve the bulk upload/download situation...as it would be zipped.
Simple solution: Create a second gmail account to serve as the back up. Always BCC: this account every mail you send from the main account. Auto forward every received mail to this account. Chances of gmail wiping both due to the same glitch is remote. This is likely to be as safe, as reliable as mucking around with imap clients running on some home grown hand-me-down server and cron jobs to take periodic back ups. Far cheaper too.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It was probably the Department of Homeland security. I am sure that one college students email was important enough to accidentally wipe out everyone else's, thanks for keeping the homeland safe!
this is easier to shrug off if you think of it as just average users using gmail. in general it's a personal mail and not intended for business. still hurts but there's only you to be upset.
the university i work at is working on migrating towards gmail for .edu domains. we have already moved our alumni to gmail and are progressing towards all students, faculty and staff on gmail.
It would be quite the s*hitstorm if some or most of our employees lost their email.
Are you seeing your account disabled due to a "perceived" violation of the TOS? What recourse is there to this issue? Whatever happened to "Don't be evil?" I can't access Apps, Voice, iGoogle. or anything else they "offer" me. I have been in this boat since yesterday morning. Anyone have any suggestions?
Win if you can... Lose if you must... But always CHEAT!
Unfortunately, Thunderbird doesn't appear to have the most efficient mail store for Gmail accounts, due to Gmail's system of supporting single messages with multiple labels (folders). If I have messages with multiple labels, it appears that Thunderbird downloads and stores the message multiple times, in multiple disk files.
Is anyone aware of an alternative that "intelligently" supports Gmail? I.E., simply downloading "All Mail", and then creating a database from each label to the associated Message-ID's in "All Mail"?
For those of us who does not care can this be added as a new feature to clean out our mailbox rather than manually deleting junk mail a page at a time.
Isn't that why you're supposed to actually test backups by restoring them before you go ahead and trust them?
Google has already stated they have a resolution, but it may take a little time to implement. They have backups, and will restore the accounts. This seems like a case of:
Something went wrong, they're fixing it.
The End.
Notorious cloud-hater, John C Dvorak, is waking up with a smug grin on his face, this morning.
What if you are trying to send an email and your IP is blocked since it is registered to an ISP and not a host?
Think of it like this. Computers crash all the time, people lose all their data, not just their emails. Many company based email clients and other email services have very poor uptime. When you calculate it, its just the 99.9% uptime with the 0.1% of downtime being 0.08% of customers can't access old emails for a short period of time, I could understand this story if they weren't getting their emails back, but they are. Besides the few minority that sync to the cloud while backing up to Tape/HDD/DVD there isn't a better place for the average person to store their email then Gmail. The amount of times I used to hear about someone losing all their emails because they went on holiday and never logged into Hotmail......
Somehow I have the feeling the responses would be completley different :-)
Aren't those ones generally rather cloudy, though?
It's still cloud computing, even if you throw yet another layer of abstraction over the top of it.
Perhaps living in Africa has given me a liaise faire approach to archiving mail. Life goes on with or without your years of email. In my working career I have always diligently backed up all mailboxes as I moved from one exchange server to another all with the belief that one day I would go back and read through my mails. I have never done this and I doubt I will be doing so in the near future. Over the years I have lost/misplaced some of the DVDs containing my vast collection of email and I have never felt the need to dig through the attic to locate some DVD with an important email stored on it.
I am struggling to read through my day to day mail. I am not going to bother setting up a backup server because I do not have the time to maintain it and I doubt I will do a better job that the "professionals" at Google. To those who lost their data I feel your pain but believe me there are worse things that can happen in life. Have a glass of wine and start your Inbox afresh.
For the rest of us, perhaps this is a timely reminder to backup our data and be less trusting of the cloud.
Okay, Slashdot, this is getting tiring. Every time a major cloud service fails, the inevitable "re-evaluate your trust in the cloud" mantra is mindlessly invoked. Everybody knows that backups are good, cloud or no cloud. Everybody knows that things go wrong, cloud or no cloud. So what's the real value-added to calling out cloud services every time something fails?
The interesting question is how the disaster is addressed. Will Google recover the data? Will it be quick? Seamless? If so, then the real lesson here isn't the weakness of the cloud, but rather its strength. Anything can go wrong with any system, but maybe Google's well-run cloud can handle the problem with minimal incidence.
So, Slashdot, rather than spouting off a thoughtless, ominous warning on every "something breaks in a cloud" story, how about you sit tight and see how this resolves?
Can't complain. We were all warned that it is a BETA product. That means things can go horribly wrong, and they warned us it wasn't really ready to be used yet.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
That's right folks, put your stuff "in the cloud" and that's what it may be worth. You're trusting valuable data to someone else. Oh sure, they have "policies" and it may never be a problem, but there's nothing like having local storage. For that matter, there's nothing like having local processing. So, maybe declaring desktop applications "dead" is not only premature, but unwise. There certainly are applications that are well suited to the cloud paradigm, but there are many that are not. Let's be careful about blindly racing to embrace new ideas just because they are cool.
An empty account would likely (maybe?) not have offline access enabled, and it is disabled by default. Possibly it could help.
This may not seem like a huge problem for many like myself that simply POP my account with Google, but my son is on a Google CR-48 prototype notebook. He has everything on the cloud. There really isn't a good way for him to backup to the notebook itself. That means that if the account is deleted, he loses all his work on the Doc's too. That would not be good.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
read the sig !
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Meanwhile, a day later, sudden heavy load brings down the Gmail IMAP service. A Google employee was heard to say "Trust me, this was completely unexpected".
Testing backups doesn't prove that they work, it just proves that they used to work, back when you did the test...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Setting up a home email server was a lot of fun; however, constantly trying to keep one step ahead of the spammers and having my email sent to the bit-bucket by poorly designed anti-spam systems used by large ISP became a major drag. I finally threw in the towel and moved my email domain to Google Apps.
I trusted Google implicitly up until a couple of months ago when the stories of email accounts being wiped started to surface and have since set up a system similar to those already mentioned here to backup my email.
*Chips away at a stone tablet*
Seriously, you kids are your emails these days. Old ways are the best, shipping isn't so bad if I aim the catapult right and if I miss the mattress at the target the message get encrypted enough I don't have to worry about theft.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Yes, everyone should be running their own mail server.
Just think of all the open SMTP relays, it'd be glorious!
Though, there's a difference between "using the cloud" and "relying entirely on the cloud".
... Google accidentally (almost) the whole thing.
Whatever. I've been about 15 years with a Yahoo e-mail account, and it has been more reliable than any of my local hard disk drives. Still, any company will eventually fade away, everything has its end. But if we are only concerned with e-mail history backup, then my view is that it is safer to rely on those big corporations with their built-in RAIDs or whatever technology they use to watch over our bits than do so on our own resources.
Another thing entirely different is information misuse or eavesdropping, but whether we trust big corporations or not, this will always be an issue as long as we are not the owners of our communication lines.
Moreover, a simple typo makes me think my grandparent meant "and I don't trust that person Eve to do it properly"—whoever "that person Eve" is ...
Adam Coward
Does Tbird even store all that stuff locally? It always seems to connect whenever I search (though my profile is 13GB). I agree with you on the annoying way it shows multiple instances of the same email.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The idea that everyone should personally handle backing up their email is insanity. If you're a professional at this stuff, then fine, do it at home as well. But for nearly everyone in the population, gmail is going to be vastly more reliable than any backup scheme they come up with at home.
For the average smtp/pop user, email works like this:
1. Grab all the new messages off the server.
2. Read a few, respond to fewer.
3. Leave all of them on the PC's non-backed-up hard drive forever.
4. Eventually buy a new computer, losing all previous messages.
5. Discard the old computer with all the old mail sitting wide open on the HD, along with Quicken, etc., for any attacker who happens upon it.
Gmail is a _vast_ improvement in security and reliability over what non-technical people wind up doing with smtp-based mail.
€2 is very cheap. I use GigaTux, which provides Xen-based hosting, running Linux, FreeBSD, or NetBSD (my VM uses FreeBSD). It's pretty cheap, and it's certainly not oversubscribed. I occasionally run big compile jobs there (it's currently the only FreeBSD/x86-64 machine I've got access to, so I occasionally use it for testing) and it's faster than my laptop. For just hosting mail, it would be overkill, but I also run a couple of mailing lists, use it for some web hosting, and run SILC and XMPP servers. Even then, I'm not really taxing the VM and could probably get away with a cheaper package, but since I switched to it from a dedicated server that cost three times as much (and was slower!) I'm not especially motivated to change.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm an instrument-rated private pilot and have flown small aircraft into clouds probably hundreds of times. They are not soft and fluffy at all, but are very turbulent and sometimes even quite violent inside. Even the "little puffy" isolated clouds you often see floating along on a warm spring afternoon can shake up a 3000 pound fully-loaded Cessna 182 very strongly.
...the more important your data is to you, the more backup copies in physically distinct locations you make of it.
The only exception to the rule is Apple, who are perfect in every way, never make a single mistake and are deserving of 100% of your unremitting trust. You never need to backup anything that Apple hold on your behalf.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
By curious coincidence, I just finished reading Douglas Merrill's book Getting Organized in the Google Era, in which he goes on at considerable length about the wonders of Gmail for personal organization and the virtues of cloud computing, generally. I don't, however, remember him mentioning a thing about backups. I'd love to hear what he has to say about this mistake.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
Mod +1 Truth Hurts
You know most of your email is going through google or AT&T anyhow right? What is the point of even trying to keep plain text away from google. Even if you do your recipient probably uses either gmail, hotmail, msn, windows search or google toolbar. Either way a huge company gets to play data miner with your emails. If it is that important don't send it by email or at the very least encrypt it! As for running your own mail setups, it isn't the setup that is the issue. It is the maintenance headache of playing a perpetual game of tic-tac-toe with a few million spammers and bots. Let's face it, google has a way larger volume of email to use to generate signatures for spam than you or I ever will, and as a linux admin if you think the best use of your time is setting up a pop3/smtp server and keeping it secured you are wasting your client's money at best and over-rating your skill set at worst. I could train a monkey to setup a mail server, but keeping it up to date without users screaming that there is too much spam or their emails are getting marked as spam when they are not is an entirely different story.
Get a web developer
The other 99.9% of the population (might need more nines, in fact) hasn't a clue how to do any of this. You might as well recommend that people do their own surgery on each other when needed, rather than trust your body to a surgeon.
How do you access the backup if mailstore folds? Is the database in a cleartext or html readable format, or is it proprietary? I couldn't find the answers on the website, as everything is geared (naturally) toward the paid version.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
If it does that, it most likely means you're not downloading messages to your system other then on demand. You need to tick the option to download entire messages rather then headers on refresh.
The thing that has always concerned me about any free mail or other data storage service is that there's no obligation on the part of the provider to give continuity of service or to restore data. I'm no lawyer, but I believe there's even a legal principle along the line that if one hasn't paid anything for the service, then there's no financial harm to the "customer" if the service goes down; if there is no harm, there is no recourse.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
Well I can tell you, Mr Doubting Thomas, that I have had a gmail account for years and have *never* had any problems with it whatsoever. From this sample of 1 I extrapolate that backing up all my mail would be a waste of my precious time.
I can assure you I WILL NEVER GET BY COMEUPPANCE! NEVER!
You thought you could break the laws of physics without paying the PRICE?
"For the rest of us, perhaps this is a timely reminder to backup our data and be less trusting of the cloud."
Although email is important, there are far more fundamental needs that warrant "backups," if you will. That's why I grow all my own food, generate my own electricity, and perform all my own medical care. Although I'm miserable focusing on all these tasks that others can perform more capably than me, it's a small price to pay in the very, very unlikely event of a catastrophe that destroys society but for some reason leaves me alive. That way, even with the failure of the "cloud" known as society, I'll be able to continue living my life the way I always have - miserably and without time for sleep, playing with my son, etc.
Cloud doesn't have anything to do with this problem. It sounds more like it was a Google issue. Just because the Gmail service runs on a cloud doesn't mean the data reset problem was not a user mistake. It says it was a bug which means a coding problem with the way Gmail operates not the cloud. The benefit of the cloud is that in this case Google is responsible for correcting the problem and restoring the last backup of data for the affected users. While this may take a little bit of time it is recoverable and does not require the user to worry about their data. As long as the provider is trusted to restore data properly there should be no need for user backup of cloud based data.
http://couchdb.apache.org/
You can host stuff in the cloud like with one fo these providers:
http://www.couchone.com/
https://cloudant.com/
and then easily backup to a desktop or even another cloud service you run yourself:
http://osdir.com/ml/db.couchdb.devel/2008-01/msg00222.html
CouchDB is a document-oriented database that supports easy replication between databases (with some indirect ideas from Lotus Notes). But I don't know of its use as an email client? Maybe a new niche there to write one...
CouchDB does not send or recieve email directly though -- one missing feature IMHO, although you could build some sort of relay to it using web standard (and maybe someone has). Basiclaly, you'd need a gateway to and from CouchDB as a server somewhere to translate between mail protocols and the http protocols CouchDB likes.
In the long term, we need a semantic desktop though...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_desktop
My own fumbling attempts in that direction:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/11/plusnet_email_fiasco/
11th July 2006 15:08 GMT
PlusNet has deleted hundreds of gigabytes of its customers' email during a storage update. The blunder also left about half its 140,000 punters unable to send and receive new email until this morning.
Data recovery engineers have been called in to try and retrieve the more than 700GB of data that was lost by the Sheffield-based ISP.
http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1154603560.htm
On the 9th July around 700GB of email was deleted. We have carried out further investigations in to the type of data that was contained in the emails. This investigation indicated that approximately 50% of these emails were identified as spam email, approximately 48% was email that had already been read, downloaded and a copy left on our servers with the remaining 1-2% of the email deleted being unread.
We have been working closely with the data recovery specialists who have been trying to recover the data on our behalf.
Due to the complexity of the task we have been unable to provide a reliable update on when recovery of data could be expected.
Our data recovery specialists have been able to provide a partial file list of the email data, but it has since become clear that we will not be able to recover the directory structure. Without the directory structure we cannot recover any meaningful data, due to complexity of associating the data with the relevant customer accounts.
nothing of value would be lost.
Seriously, who keeps *information that they need* in emails alone? I copy information to other sources -- to calendars, to documents, etc. Email as an information archive, to me, is silly.
...and the glass is half-full, I said...
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
how people don't like cloudless days. Too much time in the basement, I guess. Me? I'm gonna catch me some rays.
Way to hurt a fanboi's feelings...
feh
-AI
Well, just checked all of my accounts there, I was a lucky one.
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
...about /. double-spacing comments.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Yeah, Adam trusted Eve when she gave him an Apple and see where that got him. He should have insisted on Linux...
That's nice. Presumably you have the technical skills necessary to assure a high value of "protect it properly". Most people don't, and have to depend on someone else to do it for them.
I know for a fact Google can recover deleted accounts quite a bit after the fact (we had an admin accidentally delete a user account, all his email/contacts/calendar went poof, and the guy had around a half gig of stored email and a week or two after we figured out what happened Google was able to restore the account) so I would assume in this case the same will happen (identify the nuked accounts and restore them. Not a huge deal. To bad we have no numbers of say how often things like this happen in internal mail systems. But I'm willing to bet overall Gmail is more reliable than an in house solution and more capable of account recovery.
I have been using gmail backup for quite some time. You can run it from a batch file and fire it off once a day or more. The only problem is this. There is a problem with the IMAP protocol that was changed by Google some time ago. The gmail backup utility has never been updated so now there is a small bug in it. It marks all your email as read after you run the script. So for instance I run my backup at 9pm each night. Any email that I get between the time I last saw my email on my iphone or PC and about 9:10 is marked as read. Now that I know about this then no big deal. It took me a couple of days to figure out how it was happening. I knew I couldn't have seen some emails and they got buried from the previous day. The only other thing which I am sure I could change if I wanted to was the script has to put in a hard date. So you run a backup from 1/1/2011. I am sure there would be a way to run it based of of the current day to go back 30 days or something. I just haven't taken the time to do it. I just didn't want to lose years of history. I have had my gmail account now for about as long as gmail has been around. So I think I have 5 years of history now. I have only cleared out emails a few times and I barely hit the 25% mark.
I suppose a prudent question: when you do an IMAP sync, does it wipe off the local copies just when the remote copy has been flagged deleted, or does it also go further: if you sync to a "reset" remote account, would Tbird's IMAP recognize the local emails no longer exist at the remote and toast your local folders? Will IMAP sync easily upload a whole gmail mailbox back up to a reset account? Time to look at IMAP protocol a little more closely, since we can't 'reset' our own gmail accounts this way to test recovery techniques.
Backing up your local profiles regularly to recover against a "gmail wiped all my emails" or even a "hacker deleted all my emails" scenario would seem a reasonable precaution.
If some government agency is poking through your inbox, it isn't because it is the only way they can get to you, it is because it is convenient.
There are certainly reasons not to trust a third party with long term storage, but 3-letter paranoia isn't one of them.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
For the rest of us, perhaps this is a timely reminder to backup our data and be less trusting of the cloud.
Pardon the slashvertisement, but Syncplicity lets you synchronize Google Docs with a folder on multiple computers. You can choose either Word or OpenOffice formats; and then edit Google Docs files in Word or Open Office, even without an internet connection. The changes then are uploaded into Google Docs.
No, I will not work for your startup
I've got a couple of really important directories on my Windows box that I just rsync (via Cygwin) back to my file server. Not quite as good as a versioning backup system like Time Machine, but still pretty handy.
Yes, of course someone could lock you out and prevent you from (future) POP access. But at least in that scenario you wouldn't have lost all your e-mail history.
I've lost all trust in cloud computing; for reasons of privacy, political (not that I have reason to be a target, more about the principle), and information safety. Unfortunately, my Android phone currently has me hopelessly bound to the Google cloud with no obvious ways to extricate myself. Any leads would be much appreciated.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
While it would be a big problem for me to lose my work e-mail history (done via Exchange) - you'd be surprised how often I need to produce proof that I provided something via e-mail or someone sent me something via email - in my personal life... not so much. I've got a ton of mail in my Gmail account and although I'd just as soon not lose it, if it were to disappear, I doubt I'd notice. I got the account back when you still had to get invited to join, and while I use it quite a lot to this day, I more or less never go back into the history.
I guess it depends on what you're doing with your account.
I finally deleted (not archived) my GMail. Sorry I had to take 149,999 people with me.
I can hear the trolls start to stir at the sound of it, but you might want to consider using IBM. They offer 'cloud' hosting of Domino based email. This has the benefit of allowing you have a local copy for all of your users by just dropping a server at your location and telling it to replicate. It will give you local speed if you choose to access the local replica. You will have access to the hosted system from anywhere in the world. If you decide to go all in house at some later point, you just have them shut off the hosted server since you have the full infrastructure locally. If you don't like the Notes client, you can connect with whatever POP or IMAP client you want.
IBM might not be as hip as Google, but they do know technology.
There is only one person in the world who values my data enough to protect it properly, and that person is me.
I dunno...Google makes a lot of money with your data (if you use Gmail). I'm thinking they value money enough to keep your data protected.
How funny. If this was Hotmail, there would be tons of posts bashing Microsoft and contrasting them to the oh-so-great Gmail service. But because it's Gmail, there are tons of "It's your fault for trusting in the cloud" posts.
While this doesn't happen all that often, it happens often enough that you want to be prepared for it. I've got several years worth of work e-mail archived, and on more than one occasion I've had to reach into the figurative time machine and wave evidence in people's faces. In general I'm not that into administrative warfare, but there's nothing more satisfying than rolling up an old e-mail and sticking in the eye of some dumbass who's trying to blame you for their own mistakes.
They formally moved it out of beta in 2009. You might have an argument if you said it's a free service and they aren't obligated to provide any particular level of service (you'd have to check the TOS to be sure, and I can't be bothered), but it's definitely no longer in beta and hasn't been for quite a while.
Sounds to me like gmail should have spent longer in beta.
What idiot trusts his important data to free beta software? Hey, guys, if you don't like getting a rear-ender from gmail, demand a refund. BWAHHAHHAHHAHHAHAHAH!
Yeah, yeah, I know, Google took the "beta" off sometime ago, apparently prematurely. This is the whole problem I have with Google products. They all seem rushed and buggy, "beta" tag or not. For instance, their calendar program was a constant source of grief for us, so we finally just gave up on it.
There's nothing decent about leaving yet another machine on 24/7.
They have taken all of the accounts and disabled them. Here's the issue.
They didn't TELL anyone. When you try to log in, your pointed to a page which states you obviously violated their terms of service. Even worse, any email to your account BOUNCES telling the world the same thing.
We all know what Google does with the content and contacts in our Gmail accounts. Why are people whining over a flaw in a service they shouldn't be using for important mail in the first place? I use Gmail for porn mailing lists and it serves that purpose well. For anything personal or professional, I've always used real email.
What gets me is when folks think that storing data remotely (aka "in the cloud") is anything more than a single copy for data survival purposes. It's just another kind of storage with a different set of benefits and risks than the typical "hard drive under the mattress" backup approaches. It still pains me to think back to folks I knew in the 90's who trusted their web hosting providers to have robust redundancy and backup systems. When those providers had severe data loss issues... these users had no local backups. Major hobbyist sites with tons of work put into them ==> straight into the great bit-bucket in the sky.
As a baseline for important data, you want to have three copies of it and you want to verify your recovery process. Ideally, two of those are never in the same location at the same time. (e.g. backup #1 is secured offsite, and occasionally swapped with backup #2). Ye Olde Cloude counts as (at most) one extra copy in this sort of scheme.
> For the rest of us, perhaps this is a timely reminder to backup our data and be less trusting of the cloud.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Sure, it's always a good idea to have your own backups. But a very good reason for going with cloud-based solutions is that it's THEIR problem to back up the data.
So, go with cloud-based solutions that back up their data! It's been a long-known issue that Gmail doesn't back up their data, instead relying on redundant storage (roughly analogous to RAID) for data integrity.
Does google perform backups of data for gmail accounts that are paid? (EG: edu clients)
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Trusting your email to a company who's main business is mining data can't be safe either.
Actually, you have that backwards. Your data is all they have, and they really want to see how you use it.
The latter part of having your data spread out over unknowns is always a risk, since any government or money agency is going to do some international commerce.
This is *exactly* why I have GMail Backup run nightly
ac
Now my use of the email isn't mandated by my backup requirements.
And what do you do when your house burns to the ground with both your cheap virtual machine and BackupPC?
If you were competent you will have arranged an off-site backup, maybe not every day but at least occasionally.
Simple solution: Create a second gmail account to serve as the back up. Always BCC: this account every mail you send from the main account. Auto forward every received mail to this account. Chances of gmail wiping both due to the same glitch is remote. This is likely to be as safe, as reliable as mucking around with imap clients running on some home grown hand-me-down server and cron jobs to take periodic back ups. Far cheaper too.
It's not a bad solution from a non technical perspective, and I applaud your creativity. However, a better and less error prone method is to schedule gmail backup to run nightly on your computer. I call your method error prone because it requires user intervention for every single sent email. This is not good. Any method that requires regular user intervention is bad. However, beyond just backups, the user must review their backed up gmail regularly, which is what google (or any other) calendar is for. Just add an event to remind you to look at your backups and verify they're done (and restoreable or at least readable).
This should be a wake up call for people who think their emails really get deleted from gmail and for people foolish enough to trust everything ot a third party company FOR FREE.
Now, I am no fan of so called cloud computing but i understand it can be convinient for many reasons however i think the best way for cloud computing to evolve would be an open model.
Company X is a hosting corp and provides google docs like web based applications.
Person Y wants to host documents on the cloud to not have to worry about them being hosted locally.
Person Y doesn't completely trust X
X proposes the following deal to Y: rent a VPS somewhere, we help/let you set up our web based system for free on it for your documents but in return
you have to provide some bandwidth/storage for other people to store their documents.
Or X could even be an opensource solution, and much like jabber people set up servers and other people join whichever server they like and servers are sync'd each storing a fragment of everyone's data, so that no 1 server has the full data set, ideally.
Real cloud computing is P2P based really; Google ain't pure cloud computing and so are most of the other providers out there. Otherwise it is just a very redundant hosting solution.
The gmail problem would have been fixed easily with such a scheme because the redudancy would be on many servers, run by many different people in wide variety of locations.
Of course corporations don't like this idea because they want to sell you fancy hosting solutions that they rebranded "cloud". or provide for free, as per google's case but in return for surrendering your rights to your data.
You missed the all-important one.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
If your server is running some version of linux, you can use rsnapshot for versioning.
And as my wife just pointed out: if you're still storing it on google how do you know both your accounts aren't on the same drive? If you're going to use the GP's method, at least use a different provider. ie: gmail primary, yahoo backup.
With my docs and all in it? I have no doubt.
I sure trust that person more than I trust google.
Disclaimer: Not an Obama apologist.
US Presidents on both sides of the aisle turn their back on world leaders when they become inconvenient. Throwing people under the bus is necessary in US politics, especially it the highest levels. Hypocrisy and politics go hand-in-hand. It's made necessary because one typically needs to be ruthless to win in the partisan environment maintained in the US by people just like you. People who have a soul usually don't do well in end-game politics, at least not for long.
Doh. If I'd actually looked at what story this was when I sat back down I wouldn't have replied to something so off-topic.
Apologies to everyone else. >.
Yes, it toasts your cached emails. My university lost its email server on Thursday (which uses IMAP) and all my cached messages in Entourage were deleted the instant I was stupid enough to click on "inbox".
You can export to a number of file formats (Outlook, Thunderbird, plain text files etc), as well dumping it to an IMAP account or via SMTP.
Sure, possibly. Assuming the blooper wiped out configuration settings as well as email. But then again, a complete wipe would likely mean the account would be gone as well, so it could just as well be that settings were retained.
I printed out all my emails cause you can't always trust the cloud.
what is the "hassle" in
# chkconfig sshd on
# service sshd start
This is why you always, always, always set the isDeleted flag instead of actually deleting the data.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
If you don't want to bother with a graphical client like Thunderbird, I would recommend OfflineIMAP for backing up your remote mail accounts.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. -- Mussolini
as of this writing, it might still be another two days before i can access my account. that gmail account is linked to my google voice account (my primary home phone number, and the way i make outgoing calls). so, no home phone for three days :-(
PIAF asterisk home server
This is my setup.
FreeBSD server with RADZ (linux/ unix would work equally well).
Everything is download via fetchmail.
It is then sorted, parsed and mangled by procmail which puts it into ~/Maildir
From there courier-imap serves it up to Thunderbird clients.
Has a couple advantages.
- If gmail goes away, I still have my mail. Even if they delete my mail, then fetchmail will just find "nothing". There is no syncing, just a pulling.
- It's a lot faster over LAN then using imap/web client over WAN.
- There is spam filters on gmail, procmail and thunderbird. The 3 combined do a good job.
- There is almost always 3 copies of the mail (excluding backups!). One on google servers, one on the imap server and a copy stored in thunderbird. Add in RAIDZ, snapshots and old fashion backups (both local/remote) and it's pretty safe.
- I'm not a fan of tagging, labels, etc or whatever gmail does. I'm old fashion and like everything sorted in folders.
- Everything is in plain text in the Maildir, I can use command line tools, perl, etc to do things like search or other "fancy" stuff. For example, I went though and grabbed all attachments and saved them to a temp directory (cause I was looking for a picture). Turned on 'thumbnails' in GUI interface and found the pic I was looking for. That would be near impossible with a web client without spending hours searching though mail or scrapping html.
- I pull mail from gmail, other "free" accounts, school, work, domains, etc. Everything is dumped to one location and I have one interface to interact with *all* my email.
mbsync is a great linux utility to sync a mailbox via IMAP, and can perform either full or incremental synchronizations. I sync my gmail account to a local directory that gets backed up with the rest of my local files daily, so in effect I have daily versions of my gmail mailbox. http://isync.sourceforge.net/mbsync.html
There's a two letter difference between an automatic backup script and an automatic fuckup script.
Considering GMail has over 193.3mil users, and this affected less than .02% of users, that means it was actually less than 40 thousand.
Labels, conversations, chats, drafts? (essentially - "how complete can it be"? Yeah, I still gotta check with some recent IMAP clients, for starters...)
Generally, a thing like this must not play well with pushing "Gmail for enterprise"; or how it's tied with Android.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Just a few points...
There is only one person in the world who values my data enough to protect it properly, and that person is me.
Dam right. Trusting your email to a company who's main business is mining data can't be safe either.
Then again, since their business IS data, as you point out, it may just be important for them to keep it safe, after all...
Having your data spread out over god knows how many countries and subject to the whims of who knows what government agencies doesn't sound like a good idea.
As opposed to having it on your own hard drive and still being subject to the whims of who knows what government agencies, and NOT having the muscle that Google has to fight said agencies? If that's your big concern, I for one would be happier with them defending my data against the whims of who knows what government agencies than I would be in trying to do that myself and getting steamrolled by said government agencies - especially, as in the case with Google, they do indeed seem to make such an effort.
I run my own mail server and do nightly backups of my whole mailstore. Any decent linux admin should be able to setup a cheap virtual machine and a BackupPC server at home to do the same. In fact any decent linux admin should enjoy setting it up.
It is truly a good thing that all computer owners are decent linux admins...
Sarcasm/joke aside, what works for you - or others with the knowhow is not what works for... 90% of the computer using population. You know... people like the ones that come into our tech shop with "broken" computers because they bumped the power supply switch they dont even know exists (much less what it does)... or the ones who have no idea where their email, regardless of what service they are using, is stored? I've had people buy new computers and bring in their new and old ones and ask us to transfer their cloud-stored mail... and I've had people bring in machines (where, for instance, they use Outlook and some ISP non-web based mail solution) who think their mail is stored in magic-internet-land (when of course, it's local on their hard drive).
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
The way I do it is IMAP syncs whatever my provider has. I back up my side of it. If they delete everything, my IMAP mirror is deleted too, but I still have my backups.
I had to restore once, and it was easy: Restore everything into Local Folders; then drag and drop them back into the IMAP server.
I set up anti-spam measures back in 2003 and they lasted fairly well, but the system was hinged almost exclusively on DNSRBLs, of which 2/3 disappeared. Poor choices on my part.
Then I did a lot of research and reconfigured my anti-spam system. It's now very efficient, very cautious, and with "defense in depth" among other things, more robust and durable. It continues to work extremely well 3 years later, without adjustments.
Did the stats just now and I'm catching 99.7% spam (failing to handle 27 spam out of 8252 total spam attempts for the past month).
With the order I have my measures implemented, 30% of rejects are for broken HELOs, 40% are by DNSBL (Spamhaus XBL primarily, and SpamCop SCBL), 15% are for bogus recipient addresses, and 15% are greylisted. (Counting stats on greylisted rejections is a bit hard -- consider this a fuzzy factor. So my actual spam catch rate may be theoretically as low as 99.4%.)
I use no content-based filtering. Which saves on resources. But if I had less faith in these DNSBLs I'd probably add that into the mix.
If Spamhaus XBL failed, SpamCop SCBL and greylisting would pick up the slack very well. If XBL and SCBL failed, greylisting would probably pick up the slack well enough.
Or you could probably just set up SpamAssassin. But I'm a sysadmin by vocation, so I wanted to understand and have control.
I have Thunderbird set to open my Gmail inbox by default, and then any mail I want to save gets dragged to a local folder (which I have lots of folders by topic). About 80% of incoming mail gets deleted. The rest I now have two copies, the original on Gmail, and my local copy. I figure the chances of *both* getting trashed is pretty low.
What if you are trying to send an email and your IP is blocked since it is registered to an ISP and not a host?
Setup your mailer to allow and trust SMTP AUTH from all IPs.
DNSBL's are for IPs that don't authenticate.
And what do you do when your house burns to the ground with both your cheap virtual machine and BackupPC?
The virtual machine isn't at my home, it's from linode.com. It's hosted in a real data center with redundant power, fast network, etc. They don't cost much.
For absolutely years I've wanted to have a local mail server process to download email from various sources and store copies locally, and then I could just use a simple IMAP client to access the local email store.
This would mean I only have to backup my local mail server and could ignore the email client(s), and it would allow me to try out alternative email clients easily. At the moment I use Thunderbird, which is okay... but I wouldn't say I absolutely love it or anything! But to try alternatives risks downloading a bunch of emails and then having some data stuck in one client and some in another, and having a lot of work to do to sort it out. It's that "not enough hours in a day" problem that leaves me using Thunderbird rather than risk anything else.
Following this train of thought through, why do email clients like Thunderbird etc, do the mail download/storage/search *and* client front-end bits? If they separated it so the client was just an IMAP front-end, it would surely be better?
Anyone got a link to somewhere describing (in very simple terms) how to do this?
I recommend CrashPlan.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Isn't it just something that old people use?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
or rdiff-backup
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
I just use Backupify to backup my gmail to another cloud. What are the chances of two clouds going down at once?
I don't have MailStore on this computer, but if I remember correctly labels are handled as folders. Chats and drafts are just labels I believe, so those should be fine. Conversations as in the way Gmail presents threads? I don't believe MailStore has similar logic for presentation, but could be wrong.
For me, what matters is I have a searchable copy of all my emails, including attachments. If Google explodes, that'll do fine for a save.
I checked again (after some time), in few clients... and chats are (still?) very much not among IMAP folders visible to local client (also when a conversation has both chat and mail component); they are quite distinct. They are not labels, too, for that matter (which don't work so well as folders...). Basically it makes even using random local clients not very practical / except for few mobile ones... / Google could really push for slight extension of IMAP standard / OTOH - they want eyeballs kept in their UI...
It's still better than most IM, which generally keep only local archive (would be lost several times in the meantime), but...
One that hath name thou can not otter