Gmail accidentally resetting accounts

http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/27/gmail-accidentally-resetting-accounts-years-of-correspondence-v/

by there • 15 years ago

143 65 15 years ago

sskates• 15 years ago

Ouch. This goes against rule number 1 of software: don't lose your user's data. I'm sure they're smart enough that nothing's permanently lost, but even the perception that it could happen is bad enough to seriously tarnish their brand.

tokenadult• 15 years ago

It didn't seem to hurt Reddit at all when Reddit lost my account data early in its existence. Similarly, MSN did that years ago when I was a charter member, but that snafu alone didn't seem seriously to hurt MSN's reputation. It's annoying to me to lose a username, and I don't give repeat business to services that trash my account data in a way that causes me to be unable to use my preferred username, but plenty of people sign up for online services based on the recommendation of a friend (or perhaps an advertisement) without doing exhaustive research on the company's record of technical competence.

shantanubala• 15 years ago

The main thing is negative press. Google is already big enough that people don't need to look them up to hear about them. No news outlets really cared if you lost your very old Reddit username, but news outlets do care if it's Google losing your username because news about Google makes them money.

thisrod2• 15 years ago

> rule number 1 of software: don't lose your user's data

That doesn't scale to the scope of Gmail. The appropriate precautions to preserve old medical records differ in kind from those appropriate for old shopping lists.

I'd like my Google account to have a "Backup URL" field, that I could set to <git:tux.example.org> or <venti:glenda.example.com>. Google would undertake to push all "my" data to that URL, to pull it back as needed to recover their systems, and to publish the format it was stored in. I'd be responsible for the rest.

Venti: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/venti/venti.html or http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/venti/venti.pdf

jonknee5• 15 years ago

You can have Gmail forward all your incoming mail (or even better, just the non-spam mail). Worst case you can then import that back into Gmail. I just have a copy kept on my computer and its various backups.

brown9-2• 15 years ago

Where exactly does the 500,000 number come from?

corin_• 15 years ago

  Google says that the issue "affects less than .29%..."

I haven't looked for a source to the total number of Gmail accounts, but presumably engadget know/believe it to be around 170m.

panarky• 15 years ago

An update to the Google App Status page at 5:02 PM PDT says the issue affects less than 0.08% of Gmail users.

So if the original 500,000-user estimate was based on 0.29% affected, then we're now looking at approximately 137,000 users.

http://www.google.com/appsstatus#rm=1&di=1&hl=en

upinsmoke• 15 years ago

172,413,793 gmail users in total? According to wikipedia there are 193.3 million users monthly (as of November 2010).

akashs• 15 years ago

no worries. you couldn't delete those emails if you tried. no, seriously: http://www.law.com/jsp/tal/PubArticleTAL.jsp?id=120243445084...

blntechie• 15 years ago

Regardless of how many users affected, it's time to reclaim your emails. Have heard horror stories of users locked out and not able to restore just because they don't remember when they created the account or some facts like that.

Good time to download all my emails complete with attachments into a Outlook .pst file. Would just take 4-5 hours for my 2GB of emails. I would never want 99% of my emails but that does not make a strong point not to backup. Any one else know a better way? Backupify is one good option but they're also a cloud provider susceptible to go down any time.

46Bit• 15 years ago

I've been really looking for good alternatives to Google Apps recently - ideally, self-hosted with backup (highly encrypted) to S3 or such. I'd use my server for this, but I've yet to find an email interface which even approaches Hotmail, let alone Gmail. I've been considering doing a clone of part of the gmail interface, but need time to read up on making sure email is less likely to go to spam.

wtn• 15 years ago

Since I've moved my email to my mobile device, I've switched back to using regular IMAP on my computers.

Google refuses to release optimized versions of Talk or Gmail for iOS, I suppose so Android can have exclusivity, but it seems like an insane strategy. The Google app for iOS is Webkit garbage.

Now I use Lavabit for email. Their web interface is garbage but their security and support are top notch, and they will host mail for third party domains if you ask them to.

thought_alarm2• 15 years ago

Any POP3 client will backup your Gmail account.

I just use Mail.app. My Gmail account is not only backed up but also indexed in Spotlight and always available for off-line access. You just need to remember to start up your mail client every once and a while.

bdhe2• 15 years ago

Doesn't mail.app make it difficult for you to export your mails to non-mail.app email clients? Wouldn't Thunderbird or Evolution be better?

sankara• 15 years ago

Hotmail now has a limit of 25GB. Setting up an email forward to a hotmail account is an easy solution.

streeter• 15 years ago

I setup a script on my Ubuntu box to backup my gmail account daily with mbsync. See http://www.chrisstreeter.com/archive/2009/04/305/gmail-imap-... It uses IMAP and stores the downloaded mail in mbox format that you can view with mutt or pine. Every so often I archive the entire backup and backup that archive so I have a snapshot of the mail.

paul9290• 15 years ago

I back up my gmail by forwarding it to a comcast email address, which i then forward all that mail to a yahoo email address(double in cloud back ups). Unfortunately, my chat history is not being backed up, but my emails and all my SMSs(google voice) are.

rapind• 15 years ago

It would be easier to keep a backup if you could delete attachments (but not the messages) from your old emails. Feel free to suggest it here: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=suggestion...

cookiecaper• 15 years ago

I have Thunderbird set to download my inbox for offline usage and I periodically delete all mails from my account and store encrypted archives in safe offline locations. Sometimes I will email important mails back to my gmail in encrypted format so I can still access them from the outside wherever I have gpg.

I think with things like the HBGary hack this is only becoming more and more vital, and it's really not that hard to handle since Thunderbird already saves all my mail locally. You just move it from the IMAP folder to a local folder, export that local folder (there's a great TB extension called ImportExport that gives you lots of options here), encrypt it and upload it to multiple backup sites.

What would have happened if HBGary had a policy like this? A lot of embarrassment would have been saved, even if not all of it (much more would have been saved by sending mails encrypted in the first place).

aneesh• 15 years ago

That saved chats folder in Gmail doesn't seem to be available to IMAP clients. Anyone know a way back up chats?

1880• 15 years ago

This may be useful: http://martinml.com/en/how-to-download-and-backup-your-gtalk...

relix• 15 years ago

Some time ago I wrote a commandline tool that made a back-up of all the Gmail mails including labels, but using links instead of copies, in a Maildir format that's compatible with any IMAPd.

I use it to have a running "clone" of Gmail on my own server, alway accessible in case Gmail goes down and I need an important mail. The sparseness of the links means each mail is saved only once, regardless of how many labels you attach to it.

If anyone's interested: https://github.com/relix/gmailcc

dmoo• 15 years ago

Opera has a built in mail client, I just browse with opera on occasion and mails are downloaded in the background.

yanw• 15 years ago

Google Appstatus: http://www.google.com/appsstatus#rm=1&di=1

darklajid• 15 years ago

Kindof off-topic, but - am I the only one that hates it if there's a link on the web that redirects to a country specific site and presents itself in a language that your browser doesn't ask for, the user doesn't want and that's only 'correct' if you're looking at a f..ing ip address?

I quit most Google services because of this single annoyance (they have seriously neat hebrew sites as well. If an application wants to use my Google account and I'm over there, I have to guess which button says yes and which says no)..

I apologize for the rant. This is just barely on topic here as the worst possible user experience and I hope services of YC people don't think that i18n/l10n isn't that easy.

jonknee5• 15 years ago

I ran into this the other day when routing through Slicehost VPS via a SOCKS proxy (I was on a hotel's unsecured WiFi). Google.com kept redirecting to google.com.hk and was all in Chinese. Nuts. Even more strange was that my IP was showing from St. Louis, which is pretty far from China.

aaronkaplan• 15 years ago

Right on. I particularly hate sites like myspace and some blogging platforms that translate the window dressing (button labels, sidebar, etc.) to your local language based on IP address, with no regard to the language that the page's actual content is written in.

Zakuzaa2• 15 years ago

I have 16GB data in GMail and a 2mbps connection, how do I backup?

[Added]: I also fear that pulling so much data from Gmail might flag my account or worst, disable it. I'd really appreciate some help/suggestions.

trafficlight• 15 years ago

Get started and then sit back and wait.

Zakuzaa2• 15 years ago

If the connection is lost in-between, would the download resume from that point?

halfasleep• 15 years ago

You could use Imapsync and a VPS somewhere running an IMAP daemon. Then it's easy to sync back out to another email host if you hit trouble with Gmail

daniel022162• 15 years ago

Google is OK with you doing that, they'll eventually throttle down your IMAP connection, but it'll keep going.

kondro• 15 years ago

Because of this I have just implemented an automated backup routine for all my Gmail accounts.

I used https://github.com/rgrove/larch and Dovecot (IMAP only as no delivery required). Was very easy to setup and seems to work well (still doing initial sync though).

abalashov2• 15 years ago

And this is why we run our own mail server.

dschobel• 15 years ago

for the 0.000001% of time that gmail is down? your homebrew mail setup can beat that?

abalashov2• 15 years ago

No, for the fact that the 99.99% (you heard it, four 9s!) of time that my mail server is up, I have full control (and responsibility) for my mail.

bonch• 15 years ago

In that 0.000001% of the time (snicker), your email is 100% inaccessible.

tomjen3• 15 years ago

Honestly if I attempt to run my own mail server, chances are that I am going to be in bigger trouble than if I just used Gmail.

But you won't see it on hacker news...

sixtofour• 15 years ago

If you don't want to go to the trouble of 3rd parties (all probably excellent) or running your own imap server and synchronizing to it with larch (probably excellent) or other synch solutions,

If you use Thunderbird then you have a low barrier to entry and low cognitive load solution.

[Tools|Edit]Account Settings, then click Synchronization and Storage for you gmail account (or any other account),

then check Keep messages and click on Advanced. Then check the folders that you want to synch. The most sensible one for gmail is [Gmail]/All Mail.

Now Tbird will make a copy of all your messages in All Mail.

Caveat: I have found that the copy isn't made until you click on the All Mail folder in your folder list. Tradeoff between getting something OK working in two minutes, and the time for whatever other solution.

marcamillion2• 15 years ago

Is it just me or does Offline Mail break in Chrome on Windows 7 with Priority Inbox installed ?

For the life of me, I cannot get it working. I have had to resort to Firefox.

I had tried to backup my stuff before, but stopped and this article caused me to re-evaluate that stance.

Now I tried again and remembered why I didn't finish last time.

Thoughts ?

P.S. Sorry to hijack the thread, but it seemed appropros.

trotsky• 15 years ago

just enable pop or imap and use a traditional client?

marcamillion2• 15 years ago

I reverted to doing that.

Thanks.

pilif3• 15 years ago

the paid Google apps has an awesome feature that lets you configure it such that all outgoing mail is sent through a relay of your choice and that all incoming email should only be accepted by specific relays.

I'm using this to my advantage in that I'm keeping every mail ever sent to or from our Google apps accounts.

even better: the messages are kept in maildir format that's ready to be served over IMAP if Google really screws up.

Being able to do this configuration was the condition for me to even consider Google apps for serious purpose.

andresmh2• 15 years ago

Can you explain more about your setup? I didn't know about this and it sounds very interesting (I was considering using Backupify)

pilif3• 15 years ago

I can write a blog post about this. You will not like the solution though as my relay is running Exim, which isn't as popular these days, but the configuration syntax is actually readable (as opposed to sendmail) and it's very feature-rich (which is what I needed here)

pilif3• 15 years ago

I've written a blog post about it. Here's the submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2272343

haraball• 15 years ago

Someone could make an app or script that backups your gmails to e.g. an online backup service like Backblaze.

ashutoshm• 15 years ago

Using Google Groups To Backup Gmail

http://www.googletutor.com/using-google-groups-to-backup-gma...

Gmail accidentally resetting accounts

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