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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. An opportunity to start afresh by mmsimanga · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:IMAP sync by qubezz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.