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Gmail Bug Sends Thousands of Emails To One Man

Posted by Soulskill on from the sorry-about-your-luck dept.

An anonymous reader writes "TechCrunch is reporting on an interesting Gmail bug. Apparently, if you run a Google search for Gmail while logged in and click one of the top (and correct) results, it brings up a Compose window with an email address already filled in: the Hotmail account of a Fresno, CA man. He says he's been receiving hundreds every hour, most of which are blank, since yesterday. The article says the bug is related to the Gmail outage from earlier this afternoon."

5 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. "Gmail" Bug? by lagartoflojo · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is hardly a "Gmail bug", but rather Google indexing a direct link to Gmail with the To: field filled out with some random email address. The linkbait-y title of this post made me think that some of my private emails were getting sent to the wrong person.

  2. How do you know you're having a shitty day? by circletimessquare · · Score: 5, Funny

    When you are being DDoSed by motherfucking Google .

    --
    intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
    1. Re:How do you know you're having a shitty day? by circletimessquare · · Score: 4, Funny

      I think Google should send someone over and do that for him.

      As well as other general levels of groveling.

      This guy has a real case against Google in the court of public opinion. He doesn't have to go legal. The simple PR value here is enough for Google to make a giant public act of contrition and gift the guy with something large, to make up for the troubles they caused him.

      Hey... here's an idea: send over a high level Google engineer as this guy's personal lowly tech support guy for a month.

      Heck, that sounds like it could be a sitcom, a Youtube web series.

      Google: you can turn lemons into lemonade here, make it happen.

      --
      intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
  3. Google search for gmail by FuzzNugget · · Score: 4, Funny

    Yeah, I think we've located the source of the problem

  4. Re:Google searches while logged in to Gmail? by hawguy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So stop using gmail. When it was new it was special - clean simple webmail. Those days are long past. Outlook.com doesn't suck. Some people like Yahoo mail. Neither company does the ubiquitous tracking and analysis that Google does.

    Why do you think that if I don't use Gmail that Google can't track my searches?

    Neither company *admits* they do the ubiquitous tracking and analysis that Google does, but I've seen nothing in the Terms of Use and Privacy Policies for either vendor that precludes them from doing so, and both have popular ad networks (well, it looks like Yahoo is using Bing for search and ads), so it seems highly unlikely that they'd cede a competitive advantage to Google by not using customer data to their advantage.