Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Gmail Accidentally Resets 150,000 Accounts

Posted by samzenpus on from the did-you-need-that-mail? dept.

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."

2 of 401 comments (clear)

  1. Seems like a good place to suggest backup solution by Mascot · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).

  2. Gmail-Backup by dHeinemann · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.