Users Reporting Deleted E-mail From Gmail Accounts
We live in a time of amazing discoveries, yet there are still some mysteries that astound us. Questions like: Is there intelligent life on other plants? Does the Loch Ness Monster exist? Most recently, it's been: Dude, what the heck happened to my e-mail? A number of users of Google's popular Gmail service have reported logging into their accounts only to find that all (or at least a large portion of) their e-mails had been deleted.
Gone, without a trace.
That would be quite a shock as you can imagine, but more troubling is that Google isn't providing any real explanation. If anything, the company is trying to blame the users, implying that they were sloppy with their passwords and that other users logged into their accounts and deleted their e-mail. But, for Jessica Squazzo, who found all her e-mail from 2007 deleted, that doesn't make much sense. "If someone had hacked into my account, why would they have just erased some of my e-mail and not all?" Others wonder, if people were stealing accounts, why wouldn't they just monitor them in the hopes of learning some sort of valuable information? Or just change the password and steal the account?
Google's explanation leaves a bit to be desired and we're hoping they come up with a better one in short order. Until then, if you use Gmail, you can protect yourself by configuring your mail to forward elsewhere. Just click "Settings" and "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" to have it directed to another, hopefully somewhat more secure, account. That way you won't have to worry about those digital pictures of Nessie from your uncle getting lost.
From Network World
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jason Freidenfelds @ Nov 17th 2007 7:50PM
Hello from Google -- for privacy reasons, we don't address individual user cases, so we can't go into details on these specific cases. However, we have not seen any unusual spike in reports of compromised accounts, nor have we seen any technical problems with Gmail. We know how important Gmail is to our users. We use it ourselves for our corporate email, so we take reports like this very seriously. We encourage anyone who is having any kind of technical difficulty with Gmail to contact the Gmail Support team through the Gmail Help Center at http://mail.google.com/support/ .
Nolan De Ramos @ Dec 12th 2007 3:02PM
I experienced a situation in which all emails ( inbox, sent mail, etc and contact information to one specific account) were deleted. can i assume that this is also due to this error in gmail? i have emailed gmail support and the site/interface to post a question is difficult. i sent an email to support and i haven't had any response.
thanks,
concerned gmail user