Many Gmail Users Can't Find Their Messages

[David Baxter PhD]

Many Gmail Users Can't Find Their Messages
by Alex Chitu, Google Operating System
February 28, 2011

Imagine loading Gmail and noticing that all your messages have been deleted. This is a real problem for many Gmail users who thought that they lost all of their messages. Here's one of the many reports from Gmail's forum:

Yes, whatever the error is on Google's end (and it clearly is that, not a hack, unless it's some kind of inside hack) it's basically reset my account so it's like a brand-new Gmail account. My contacts are intact, but nothing else--the folders have reset to default, my signature line is blank, the "theme" is changed back to the default and--of course--every single email from the last 7 years has vanished completely.
​

The Google Apps Status page mentions that "this issue affects less than 0.08% of the Google Mail userbase" and "Google engineers are working to restore full access". The users that are affected "will be temporarily unable to sign in".

Read more...

 

[David Baxter PhD]

Gmail bug resets accounts; users fret over lost kitten photos

Gmail bug resets accounts; users fret over lost kitten photos
by Zosia Bielski, Globe and Mail
Monday, February 28, 2011

Amid news that a bug had reset the Gmail accounts of tens of thousands of users on Sunday ? effectively deleting the contents of their inboxes ? did you frantically check yours this morning?

Did your mind race through all the things you might have just lost?

Piles of NSFW e-mails from an ex that you?ve never actually reopened? Endearing but unnecessarily high-resolution JPGs of kitties and puppy dogs from your tech-savvy mom? Mountains of family photos that you?ll print up and catalogue in an album (one day)?

Would it be a blessing in disguise, or a nostalgic nightmare?

The affected users said their e-mails, chats, contacts, folders and settings had all been wiped out.

Google has been working on the issue since early Sunday and updating users hourly on this crude ?dashboard?.

As of 1 p.m. ET Monday, access had been restored to one-third of the jilted users. Google expects ?the issue to be resolved for everyone within 12 hours,? according to its updates.

Initially pegged at approximately 500,000 affected users and then 150,000, the number was recalculated to 0.02 per cent of total users as of Monday afternoon.

That?s still in the tens of thousands, which didn?t placate many users who were having a conniption on message boards: ?Don?t scare me I have 4 years worth of eMail on that!!!!!!!!?, wrote one commenter.

With 7.5 gigabytes of free space, it?s forgivable to chuck your entire life into the catch-all storage. The alternatives seem time-consuming, at least before the system crashed. They include backing up data on Microsoft?s Hotmail service or a desktop e-mail account.

Still, even that leaves e-mail hoarders leery, since Hotmail had a similar problem in January.

 

[David Baxter PhD]

Gmail fixed, but some emails lost for good

Gmail fixed, but some emails lost for good
CBC News
Mar 1, 2011

Backing up email on hard drives recommended

Missing Gmail messages have been restored to thousands of users, but some emails sent over the past two days may be gone for good.

As of 9:30 a.m. ET Tuesday morning, Google's App Status dashboard reported no problems with Gmail, indicating that it had restored the missing data.

However, a blog post Monday evening by Ben Treynor, Google's vice president of engineering, noted that email sent to affected users between 9 p.m. ET Sunday and 5 p.m. ET Monday "was likely not delivered." The email likely didn't bounce or otherwise notify the sender that it hadn't reached its destination, Treynor added.

He apologized for the problem and said Gmail should be back soon for everyone.

About 0.02 per cent of Gmail users were affected by the problem, which completely emptied their user accounts. Gmail doesn't release official user statistics, but media outlets estimate there are roughly 190 million Gmail users, so about 38,000 were affected.

"The good news is that email was never lost and we've restored access for many of those affected," Treynor wrote.

The post explained that while Google keeps multiple copies of user data at multiple data centres, in this case, a bug in a storage software update affected several copies of the data, deleting them.

The company had to restore the data from tape backups, which was a time consuming process, the company said.

Following the outage, a number of software blogs have been recommending that users back up their email using offline mail readers such as Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird, or by setting up Hotmail to receive copies of Gmail messages.

 

[Retired]

My Gmail account was not affected. I wonder if any of our Psychlinks members lost access or lost emails on Gmail.