Slashdot Mirror
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
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
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.
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 :)
...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
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
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).
The expectation is that the 3rd party (Google in this case) are doing the backing up for you. If you were paying for Google Apps, you'd make damned sure your contract says so. As a free GMail user, I admit I haven't read the small print recently, but my assumption is that my data is "backed up". "Backed up" in quotes, because rather than there being a regular copy made to tape or whatever, their storage grid inherently has everything in multiple places.
They seem to be saying they'll recover the mailboxes in due course. If that's true, then it shows that their service is "as good as" having your own backup. Indeed it's better, because they did the recovery for free. Most people find recovering from their backup non-trivial.
If they fail to recover even one of these accounts, that's a big fail for Google.
I know one place where the value of backups is learned hard and fast: Grad School. I warned my classmates (read: I explained to them how paranoid I was) but everyone scoffed until on of them lost 6 months of thesis work. Never have I seen the phrase "spooked the herd" so convincingly demonstrated. Next thing you knew "saving" your work meant clicking save (to thumbdrive), clicking print, clicking email-to, and copy-to-network. We had two more people "lose work" who were subsequently saved by the process ... no one ever had to resort to retyping from the printed document ;-)
If you can't be good, be good at it!
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
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.
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"?
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.
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.
I think GP expected you to have noted the adverts before blocking them.
Honestly, I think that for most people this just isn't a concern.
Most folks have been bitten by the lack of a backup at some point. You can't tell me they've never been working on a paper for a class and had the machine crap out on them - losing many pages of work. You can't tell me they've never been playing a game and had the machine crap out on them - losing a couple hours of progress. You can't tell me they've never sent an SD card through the laundry - losing some irreplaceable photos. You can't tell me they've never clicked "submit" on some forum comment or Facebook post and had the website malfunction - losing whatever witty thoughts they had at the time.
It happens all the freaking time.
But, for the most part, that information isn't all that valuable.
Folks will curse and mutter... And then re-type their paper, or re-play the game, or live without those pictures.
Folks won't feel like they need to back up their data until they're really burned by it. Just telling people that they need to make backups is not enough. Just teaching it in class isn't enough. Folks need to lose something that they care about.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
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
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.
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.
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
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?
And why should this morning be any different than any other?
Discussion System prefs link: http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=editcomm
If you use a forward slash instead of backward in the folder name, you might trick your mail client to arrange the mail in a tree structure. I noticed this with GMail in Evolution on Ubuntu.
YMMV.
That's not so much tricking the client, but rather a feature that Google added to GMail a few years ago. If you put a slash in a label name it makes nested folders in IMAP, and also if you go into the Labs settings in GMail, there's a "Nested Labels" lab you can enable to get it in the web interface.
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.
Lol, really? No one's gonna mod that funny as hell?
Sorry man, I got no points.
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
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.
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
And the point is that you have no say in the matter. You must "sit tight" and wait on Google to do something to save your valuable data. Yet, for some reason, you perceive a list of unanswered questions as a strength of the cloud, as if helplessly wondering what Google is going to do to save the data you've stored in its free service is an advantageous position to be in.
The value is in reminding everyone that relying on a so-called "cloud" (the buzzword people use now to refer to anything that's web-based) puts you in a passive, helpless position when something goes wrong, trusting in the keeper of your data to competently save your ass.
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.
It was and they did: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/01/02/0233231/Some-Hotmail-Accounts-Wiped#comments
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.