Gmail Glitch Is Causing 1000s Of Emails To Be Sent To One Man’s Hotmail Account

http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/24/gmail-glitch-is-causing-thousands-of-emails-to-be-sent-to-one-mans-hotmail-account/

by coloneltcb • 12 years ago

299 138 12 years ago

techcrunch.com

gfodor2• 12 years ago

if this happened to me i would probably ask myself if i am living in a simulation or something.

joaorj• 12 years ago

how could this be a sign that you are living in a simulation?

gfodor2• 12 years ago

if one googless "gmail" and sees the top link opening a compose e-mail to your e-mail address, one probably starts to question reality or if they are in a dream, because it's so insane. its not like winning the lottery or getting hit by lightning, it seems more rare than that because it's an unexpected event that is tied to you. basically the emotional equivalent of going to times square and seeing your picture on one of the big screens with no explanation. fucking crazy.

stackcollision• 12 years ago

This is quite possibly the most hilarious bug I've ever seen.

What I really want to know is who the hell actually googles "gmail"? There's a link at the top of the homepage!

vezzy-fnord2• 12 years ago

What I really want to know is who the hell actually googles "gmail"? There's a link at the top of the homepage!

You'd be surprised at what some people do (on laptops and desktops). I've seen ones who refuse to type URLs in the address bar, with the sole exception of google.com, which they then use to type in the URL for the site they're looking for.

They don't even realize the search bar on the top right exists.

ableal• 12 years ago

Quite a few browsers do not have a "search bar on the top right".

They use a single field for both URL and search.

Shish2k• 12 years ago

I know someone who uses the search bar in the top right to google for "google.com", which they then use to search for "yahoo", then having arrived at yahoo's front page, they search for "mail" to get to yahoo mail. Apparently typing "mail.yahoo.com" into the address bar (or just typing "mail" and having it auto-complete) is "too complicated"...

(I presume that this sort of person is who the GNOME UI team think of when they talk about "average user"? :|)

sp332• 12 years ago

People feel a lot of pressure to fill in prompts with blinking cursors.

dunham• 12 years ago

This is what you get if you type "gmail" into chrome's location bar.

steveklabnik• 12 years ago

Wait till you hear about the 'Facebook login' fiasco: http://readwrite.com/2010/02/11/how_google_failed_internet_m...

izzydata2• 12 years ago

"It's not every day you get to watch the birth of an Internet meme"

Yes, yes it is.

rajbala2• 12 years ago

You'd be surprised at how the normals use the Internet. Searching Google for destinations such as Yahoo, Gmail, Facebook, etc is incredibly common.

aray• 12 years ago

Using search engines this way is also called "navigational search" and it's still how most of the world navigates the web (even sites they know well and use daily!)

lostlogin• 12 years ago

You missed the best one that I see almost daily. Typing 'Google' in the search bar. With a cap of course.

dagw• 12 years ago

In Chrome and Firefox, if you lazily type "gmail" into the address bar rather than "gmail.com" then it will google it for you. I suspect it's rather common, I know I've done it a few times by accident.

jaredmcateer• 12 years ago

By default typing "gmail" in Chrome's omnibar it will autocomplete to "gmail.com" If you've ever typed it out before.

tehwalrus• 12 years ago

I just type "mail." and it autocompletes to "mail.google.com".

EDIT: in fact, just typing "m" autocompletes to that...

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

Apparently old people do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuOBzWF0Aws&feature=youtu.be...

tomashertus• 12 years ago

This is truly hilarious. Just imagine - some guy, in the middle of nowhere, sitting in front of his computer and suddenly his smartphone starts vibrating with notification about new email. And vibrating.... and vibrating... and after dozens of minutes, he got call. And the caller ask you: Hey, don't you get some emails lately?:D

herge• 12 years ago

Finding the search box on google.com, typing gmail and typing enter and then clicking on a large link in bold is a lot easier than clicking successfully on a small subtle link on the top of page.

It's also a lot less error prone than typing gmail.com into the address bar, which could be missed typed as gail.com, mail.com, etc.

atwebb• 12 years ago

I do it sometimes by accident, mainly when incognito or on another computer. Alt+D->gmail-> enter, so I miss the autocomplete and it does a search.

lisp-and-seo• 12 years ago

Try Alt+D->gmail->control+enter next time.

Or even better - host your own email server.

phaus• 12 years ago

On some mobile browsers, such as Chrome on my Nexus 7, it doesn't show gmail at the top of the page.up.

userbinator4• 12 years ago

There are some people who actually google... Google.

ErrantX• 12 years ago

There is almost certainly a majority that Google google.

swatkat• 12 years ago

I never type website addresses in browser :) I just type phrases like "gmail", "hacker news" or "stanchart india" in Chrome/Firefox omnibox and then click the first/correct search result. I kind of use Google search as way to avoid typos in addresses that may lead of phishing sites.

graeme2• 12 years ago

I've never clicked on that link.

Different people have different habits. I generally google find most sites unless it's an easy URL or autocompleted. I sometimes even type things like "hack new" on my phone to get here.

(I don't want to make it too easy to get here, if you're wondering why I haven't bookmarked it. Can be a time sink)

wgx• 12 years ago

I have to say: I've done user testing with (probably hundreds of) users over the years, and I'd say the majority (anecdata) of users never type a URL or use a bookmark - typing 'facebook' or 'gmail' into Google is a very common thing. Incomprehensible as this may be to us nerds, it's a very real thing.

VMG3• 12 years ago

This is ridiculous... the search result really links to

    https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&to=dsp559@hotmail.com

new_test• 12 years ago

Someone's getting fired tonight.

deletes• 12 years ago

Does google fire over single( assuming ) mistakes. I didn't think they were that kind of company. Isn't there a voting to determine that?

myko• 12 years ago

Well, hopefully nothing that dire - I can't imagine this would happen. Likely though those responsible for the incident will craft an incident report detailing what went wrong and why, as well as how to prevent it in the future - preferably in an automated fashion.

taproot• 12 years ago

Humor, on the internet. Never.

darkarmani• 12 years ago

Somewhere out there, I'm sure someone is getting fired.

noodly2• 12 years ago

and the second one (for "GMail - Google") is:

   https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&to=material@asvd.sasf.ch

VMG3• 12 years ago

Apparently Google indexes those links like any other: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:mail.google.com+mailto#...

huhtenberg• 12 years ago

Are you in Switzerland?

josu• 12 years ago

Mexico here, same thing.

ashishb4u2• 12 years ago

for me its jeff.morse@d214.org

sh4na• 12 years ago

Yup, same for me here. WTH is going on??

akennberg2• 12 years ago

It really depends where the crawler is finding these links. I don't think this is a mistake. It's possible that people are adding these links to their site instead of "mailto:" links and crawler is simply indexing them.

mikeash• 12 years ago

I can totally understand why the crawler would crawl this URL.

However, I can't understand how this one specific URL ended up being shown as the second link when you search for "gmail".

freehunter• 12 years ago

When I search it tries to link me directly to an attachment from an email, but tells me my account is suspended. I am already logged into Gmail though, so it might be different.

TrainedMonkey• 12 years ago

This is craziest thing I saw this year. And I've been watching The Daily Show, so there are no shortage of crazy things.

In any case, I really look forward to explanation how the hell something like this could ever happen.

VMG3• 12 years ago

The search index is built in mysterious ways, not only from crawled links but also visited sites in Chrome I suppose. We'll probably get an in-depth article from an SEO blog.

claudius• 12 years ago

But, to be fair, it is only the 24th of January, so there might well be many more crazy things for us in stock. Though Google linking directly to mail some poor Hotmail account will be hard to top, yes.

bhartzer• 12 years ago

I am not sure it's a glitch. It could be someone link bombed it.

hcarvalhoalves2• 12 years ago

That's priceless. I would sell all inbound addresses on the spam market as high-quality leads. >:)

eli• 12 years ago

Those are just valid email addresses (and names, I guess). High-quality leads would be a list of people who are already especially qualified or interested in whatever you're pitching.

0x02• 12 years ago

If they are actually composing and sending an email without checking what's going on, I guess that says something about those users' personalities... :)

bhhaskin• 12 years ago

That is great! Poor guy.

vezzy-fnord2• 12 years ago

This reminds me of a story on an Australian comedy show where the host gave out an unusual telephone number, calling it "Satan's phone number". Turns out it was a valid number that belonged to some poor sap who got inundated with phone calls. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a source after reading this years ago, so if anyone can confirm this as real or a hoax, step up.

But this really makes me wonder what kind of architectural mishap has had to occur for this to happen? Either way, the poor guy just became a celebrity. Hope he gets some benefit out of it.

dictum• 12 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/867-5309/Jenny#Popularity_and_...

rubycowgames• 12 years ago

Bad sitelink (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/47334?hl=en) selection there.

danrockwelljr• 12 years ago

It's not a "Gmail Glitch", seems like an index error by Google search, his email was indexed in the site links for "Gmail". I assume that due to the outage searches for "Gmail" spiked, so has his inbox was ddos'd.

dudus2• 12 years ago

I agree it seems more like a Google Search glitch. The title should be updated.

yaw• 12 years ago

Yesterday the GMail App for iOS glitched on me as well. At one point the number of unread emails went to over 2k (in reality about 200), and then notifications for the app got enabled (usually disabled). Nothing major, just minor annoyances.

I didn't think much about it until today's events. Coincidence?

nashashmi• 12 years ago

off topic, but the one thing that I hate about google search results is that they are all linked to google.com/url?*. Sometimes my internet will crap out just because of this. Because google's server is too slow to redirect.

dclara3• 12 years ago

I guess this is for CPC. But it should not be applied on the organic results.

It's unbelievable that Google can redirect so many hits at the same time even only on one local server cluster.

I've a review collecting the reports about how many Google servers here: http://bit.ly/1fcluBA: 900,000 (2010)

dangrossman• 12 years ago

I guess this is for CPC. But it should not be applied on the organic results.

It's been used on all SERPs for months now, ever since Google became extra privacy conscious. It prevents search queries from leaking to site owners via the referrer HTTP header.

0x02• 12 years ago

They certainly do it for organic results sometimes too. A/B testing or measuring quality of results? Annoying to no end if you want to copy an url directly. I remember looking into it a few years ago and they even went so far as to add js setting the status bar text to the normal url on mouseover.

spindritf• 12 years ago

Yes, it's annoying. There are addons to get rid of it like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search...

daviddoran• 12 years ago

The actual behaviour (the link with a random email address) is so far from the expected behaviour I'm finding it hard to believe how it happened. Probably search indexing/ranking error as others have speculated.

mattparcher• 12 years ago

This made me laugh:

...he contacted Hotmail support this morning to try to get help. Ironically, he asked them to contact him at his alternate email address, which is Gmail.

yeukhon3• 12 years ago

But then this is surprisingly quick. A few years back support email could take a month... that was my experience.

atmosx• 12 years ago

+100 because we're talking about hotmail (microsoft) here.

baconner• 12 years ago

Let me guess nsa@hotmail.com?

jfb• 12 years ago

The one guy on the Internet who is happy that Google fell over today?

ashishb4u2• 12 years ago

I see jeff.morse@d214.org

thrownaway2424• 12 years ago

Hopefully Google will send this innocent bystander a valuable collectible Scroogled mug.

bitstorm999• 12 years ago

And the other link on the search results page [Gmail - Google] points to material@asvd.sasf.ch

systems• 12 years ago

emails can sometime include passwords or pass reset link

this is extrememly dangerous

how can we find out if we were affected

sejje• 12 years ago

He's not getting emails addressed to you, relax and read about the actual bug.

rajbala2• 12 years ago

That guy should buy a lottery ticket posthaste.

Kluny• 12 years ago

They're trying to reach Gmail for a comment, but they can't, cause Gmail is down. It's funny. It's also made me realize that I should switch to email provider that I have more control over.

jsmthrowaway2• 12 years ago

I have so many questions after finishing that article, but first to come to mind is: who puts a HTML FAQ in their e-mail signature? Seriously, who does that?

html5web• 12 years ago

The only thing was put was email address, tech crunch just tested the link.

ceejayoz• 12 years ago

Yes, but look at the TechCrunch author's e-mail signature. An entire screen of FAQs about the author and how to contact them.

http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/screen-s...

TallGuyShort• 12 years ago

He's referring to the default contents of the email when that TechCrunch employee starts composing an email.

clarkm• 12 years ago

I was going to ask the same about googling "gmail", clicking the second link, and actually sending a blank email. But apparently the answer is "thousands of people" a day.

I learn something new about users every day.

edavis• 12 years ago

It's probably healthy for us "web people" to get a reminder every so often that vast swaths of humanity use computers in ways that are nearly incomprehensible to us.

ibrahima• 12 years ago

Seriously, the number of wrong turns you had to take to get there... wtf? I kind of feel like from a UI perspective, you can try to make your site as usable as possible, but someone will always run into the dumbest edge case or contact you to ask questions which are clearly answered on the site.

userbinator4• 12 years ago

Could a lot of that activity just be bots?

Timmmmbob• 12 years ago

I have an Android app with my email as the support address. Probably half of the emails I get from there are blank. No idea why.

csomar• 12 years ago

TechCrunch blogger?

Crisco• 12 years ago

Yikes! At first glance I thought those were questions to Mr. Peck and thought it was fine, but if that's the signature.... It's a little presumptuous isn't it.

sharkweek• 12 years ago

I'm sure they get hounded by hundreds of PR people every day - so it might just be easier to outline the FAQ in every email

If it were me I'd just set up a Canned Response, but to each their own I suppose

sarahintampa• 12 years ago

It's my email FAQ. I get a lot of email - it's my largest social network containing 1000's of connections. I came up with the idea of the FAQ to head off having to answer the same questions over and over again. I used to have it as a list of social networks (twitter/skype/phone, etc.) but people ignored that. And that didn't allow me to give the details the FAQ does. The FAQ catches people's attention better than the traditional signature. It has cut down on those kinds of questions by ~70-80%, I'd say. So maybe it's presumptuous, but it was the more successful of my A/B testing. And it's not as noticeable when there's a big ol' email on top of it. So WHO does something like that?!! Me. I do.

izzydata2• 12 years ago

I sent him an email. I'm pretty sure that's what this article was wanting me to do.

btown• 12 years ago

I wonder if someone messed up the robots.txt on Gmail - and then their crawler started indexing individuals' Gmail accounts?

maxerickson• 12 years ago

The crawler hopefully wouldn't be logged in as everyone.

I guess the links are just posted to pages by accident.

blauwbilgorgel• 12 years ago

I filed a bug report about this 3 months ago. I did completely agree this is not likely to be a serious security issue (only a few indexed emails will contain phonenumbers or private information, even less likely private as Googlebot must have publicly found these links online, though some message bodies did hint at stuff like password resets).

It is worth looking into from an SEO perspective, site (index) health perspective and to ultimately prevent/minimize problems like these.

In my opinion these links do not belong in the index. https://mail.google.com/mail/ should have been the Canonical. Big companies expose the contents of SMS messages, who contacts who, and sometimes even what their users search for.

Now these pre-filled "to"-field links were picked up by accident with the automated sitelinks algorithm. It could have contained a pre-filled "body" too, maybe some spam or maybe a crude online link to make an appointment and have certain fields filled in.

Webmasters can prevent this by specifying Canonical and cultivating the search index quality by only letting bots index unique quality pages, not for example have pages and pages of user-generated search results (Consider noindexing /search/results/), open redirect link(spam), or indexing every possible way a user may change your URL parameters and posting a link of that somewhere to be picked up by the search bots.

trevin• 12 years ago

It's not limited to a small number of Gmail accounts. If you use some additional search parameters you'll see a ton of compose URLs showing up in the SERPs

Searching:

site:mail.google.com gmail inurl:?to=

gave me nearly 25,000 results. Some have subject lines too.

EDIT: Here are the first 100 URLs for the search above: http://pastebin.com/X1yTW7Pr

ihsw• 12 years ago

I get only 8 results. Fascinating.

marquis2• 12 years ago

I am seeing some private emails with subjects AND body, apparently spam but sometimes half-written content like "Dear John,". Someone build a spam bot and left the links out for indexing?

vanmount• 12 years ago

A few of those could be Drafts... So maybe Google indexed the drafts of its users?

krapp• 12 years ago

Not to worry though. By the time Google's driving our cars for us, glitches like this will have been sorted out.

erichurkman• 12 years ago

Repeat this bug for the self-driving cars and you'd end up with thousands of cars driving to some random guy's house.

That'd certainly be an interesting news story.

gdulli• 12 years ago

For something like self-driving cars I'd have ten times more trust in a company that excels in humility than one like Google with success and experience in data mining.

Hubris and excessive confidence in engineering ability here are a recipe for disaster.

Pxtl• 12 years ago

Seems fixed, I google gmail and I don't see the link.

knassy• 12 years ago

And he lives in Wyoming right?

yeukhon3• 12 years ago

https://www.google.com/#q=site:mail.google.com+gmail+inurl:%... https://www.google.com/#q=site:mail.google.com+gmail+inurl:%... this one has a template

nollidge• 12 years ago

I don't get how this is happening. Why are those links even in the search results?

Also it's not showing either of those sub-items for me when I google "gmail", so I wonder if it's fixed now.

Aoyagi• 12 years ago

The poor "upgrade" script, which was the reason for the outage, confused that guy's address with NSA's. Tragic story.

presspot• 12 years ago

This is what stands for news at Techcrunch?

coreymgilmore• 12 years ago

I must say, all the news about this outage is crazy. Emailing random people, strange search indexing, gmail down for 1+ hour! Nutty

mariuolo• 12 years ago

The recipient should put those emails on a website for everyone to see, along with a description of the issue.

Sometimes public shaming is the only way to push big firms into action.

Gmail Glitch Is Causing 1000s Of Emails To Be Sent To One Man’s Hotmail Account

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