6 ms·

Gmail accidentally resetting accounts

143 points by there 16y ago

sskates 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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.
- thisrod 16y 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 http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/venti/venti.html or http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/venti/venti.pdf http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/venti/venti.pdf
  - jonknee 16y 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.
    - thisrod 16y ago
      That works for my Gmail account. What about my HN posts? What if I don't have a reliable backup server of my own? Web 2.0 needs to abstract backup the way web 1.0 abstracted get and put. Venti does exactly that, and git might work too.
      - joeyh 16y ago
        Does an implementation of Venti exist? I'd bet on git. It has the mind-share already. Now, I can already run "webcheckout $url" and get a git repository for any of the websites I run, as well as all of the wikis and blogs of customers at my startup, Branchable.com. That is implemented via a proto-RFC called the "rel=vcs microformat", which simply adds a little data to web pages to indicate where the underlaying data can be cloned from. <http://kitenet.net/~joey/rfc/rel-vcs/&#62 http://kitenet.net/~joey/rfc/rel-vcs/>
        enneff 16y ago
        > Does an implementation of Venti exist? Yes. http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/cmd/venti/ http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/cmd/venti/ http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/libventi/ http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/libventi/ And Fossil is a core piece, too: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/cmd/fossil/ http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/cmd/fossil/
brown9-2 16y ago
Where exactly does the 500,000 number come from?
- corin_ 16y 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 16y 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 http://www.google.com/appsstatus#rm=1&di=1&hl=en
upinsmoke 16y ago
172,413,793 gmail users in total? According to wikipedia there are 193.3 million users monthly (as of November 2010).
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
akashs 16y ago
no worries. you couldn't delete those emails if you tried. no, seriously: http://www.law.com/jsp/tal/PubArticleTAL.jsp?id=1202434450846&slreturn=1&hbxlogin=1 http://www.law.com/jsp/tal/PubArticleTAL.jsp?id=120243445084...
blntechie 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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.
    - dantheman 16y ago
      I think the lack of a gmail app is due to apple not letting them release one since it duplicates the functionality of apples mail.
    - techsupporter 16y ago
      If you want to do e-mail syncing on most mobile devices, NuevaSync[1] provides an ActiveSync interface for any IMAP-capable e-mail account. I'm using them to do calendar sync to a device that doesn't do iCal and the service has performed quite well. Nueva even offers device wipe as an included feature. 1 - http://nuevasync.com/ http://nuevasync.com/ .. I have no affiliation other than being a customer at $15/year.
yanw 16y ago
Google Appstatus: http://www.google.com/appsstatus#rm=1&di=1 http://www.google.com/appsstatus#rm=1&di=1
- darklajid 16y 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.
  - jonknee 16y 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.
    - daniel02216 16y ago
      google.com/ncr fixes your cookie so that it won't redirect anymore.
  - aaronkaplan 16y 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.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- sorbus 16y ago
  For the casual user, temporarily losing all their emails while google recovers from backups is far, far better than permanently losing all of their emails when their hard drive crashes and they realize that they had forgotten to backup.
Zakuzaa 16y 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 16y ago
  Get started and then sit back and wait.
  - Zakuzaa 16y ago
    If the connection is lost in-between, would the download resume from that point?
    - jonknee 16y ago
      Yes, because it's not just one file but thousands of individual messages. If you start downloading by POP or IMAP it will bring down the individual messages, so if you get stuck in the middle it will resume (after some waiting time to figure out what's not transfered). It only takes a long time once and then should be hardly noticeable.
- halfasleep 16y 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
- daniel02216 16y ago
  Google is OK with you doing that, they'll eventually throttle down your IMAP connection, but it'll keep going.
kondro 16y ago
Because of this I have just implemented an automated backup routine for all my Gmail accounts. I used https://github.com/rgrove/larch 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).
abalashov 16y ago
And this is why we run our own mail server.
- dschobel 16y ago
  for the 0.000001% of time that gmail is down? your homebrew mail setup can beat that?
  - abalashov 16y 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 16y ago
    In that 0.000001% of the time (snicker), your email is 100% inaccessible.
- tomjen3 16y 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 16y 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.
marcamillion 16y 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 16y ago
  just enable pop or imap and use a traditional client?
  - marcamillion 16y ago
    I reverted to doing that. Thanks.
pilif 16y 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.
- andresmh 16y ago
  Can you explain more about your setup? I didn't know about this and it sounds very interesting (I was considering using Backupify)
  - pilif 16y 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)
  - pilif 16y ago
    I've written a blog post about it. Here's the submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2272343 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2272343
haraball 16y ago
Someone could make an app or script that backups your gmails to e.g. an online backup service like Backblaze.
ashutoshm 16y ago
Using Google Groups To Backup Gmail http://www.googletutor.com/using-google-groups-to-backup-gmail/ http://www.googletutor.com/using-google-groups-to-backup-gma...

143 points by there 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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.
thisrod 16y 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 http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/venti/venti.html or http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/venti/venti.pdf http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/venti/venti.pdf
- jonknee 16y 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.
  - thisrod 16y ago
    That works for my Gmail account. What about my HN posts? What if I don't have a reliable backup server of my own? Web 2.0 needs to abstract backup the way web 1.0 abstracted get and put. Venti does exactly that, and git might work too.
    - joeyh 16y ago
      Does an implementation of Venti exist? I'd bet on git. It has the mind-share already. Now, I can already run "webcheckout $url" and get a git repository for any of the websites I run, as well as all of the wikis and blogs of customers at my startup, Branchable.com. That is implemented via a proto-RFC called the "rel=vcs microformat", which simply adds a little data to web pages to indicate where the underlaying data can be cloned from. <http://kitenet.net/~joey/rfc/rel-vcs/&#62 http://kitenet.net/~joey/rfc/rel-vcs/>
      - enneff 16y ago
        > Does an implementation of Venti exist? Yes. http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/cmd/venti/ http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/cmd/venti/ http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/libventi/ http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/libventi/ And Fossil is a core piece, too: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/cmd/fossil/ http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/src/cmd/fossil/

brown9-2 16y ago

Where exactly does the 500,000 number come from?

corin_ 16y 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 16y 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 http://www.google.com/appsstatus#rm=1&di=1&hl=en

upinsmoke 16y ago

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

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

akashs 16y ago

no worries. you couldn't delete those emails if you tried. no, seriously: http://www.law.com/jsp/tal/PubArticleTAL.jsp?id=1202434450846&slreturn=1&hbxlogin=1 http://www.law.com/jsp/tal/PubArticleTAL.jsp?id=120243445084...

blntechie 16y 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 16y 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 16y 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.
  - dantheman 16y ago
    I think the lack of a gmail app is due to apple not letting them release one since it duplicates the functionality of apples mail.
  - techsupporter 16y ago
    If you want to do e-mail syncing on most mobile devices, NuevaSync[1] provides an ActiveSync interface for any IMAP-capable e-mail account. I'm using them to do calendar sync to a device that doesn't do iCal and the service has performed quite well. Nueva even offers device wipe as an included feature. 1 - http://nuevasync.com/ http://nuevasync.com/ .. I have no affiliation other than being a customer at $15/year.

yanw 16y ago

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

darklajid 16y 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.
- jonknee 16y 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.
  - daniel02216 16y ago
    google.com/ncr fixes your cookie so that it won't redirect anymore.
- aaronkaplan 16y 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.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

sorbus 16y ago
For the casual user, temporarily losing all their emails while google recovers from backups is far, far better than permanently losing all of their emails when their hard drive crashes and they realize that they had forgotten to backup.

Zakuzaa 16y 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 16y ago
Get started and then sit back and wait.
- Zakuzaa 16y ago
  If the connection is lost in-between, would the download resume from that point?
  - jonknee 16y ago
    Yes, because it's not just one file but thousands of individual messages. If you start downloading by POP or IMAP it will bring down the individual messages, so if you get stuck in the middle it will resume (after some waiting time to figure out what's not transfered). It only takes a long time once and then should be hardly noticeable.
halfasleep 16y 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
daniel02216 16y ago
Google is OK with you doing that, they'll eventually throttle down your IMAP connection, but it'll keep going.

kondro 16y ago

Because of this I have just implemented an automated backup routine for all my Gmail accounts. I used https://github.com/rgrove/larch 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).

abalashov 16y ago

And this is why we run our own mail server.

dschobel 16y ago
for the 0.000001% of time that gmail is down? your homebrew mail setup can beat that?
- abalashov 16y 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 16y ago
  In that 0.000001% of the time (snicker), your email is 100% inaccessible.
tomjen3 16y 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 16y 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.

marcamillion 16y 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 16y ago
just enable pop or imap and use a traditional client?
- marcamillion 16y ago
  I reverted to doing that. Thanks.

pilif 16y 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.

andresmh 16y ago
Can you explain more about your setup? I didn't know about this and it sounds very interesting (I was considering using Backupify)
- pilif 16y 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)
- pilif 16y ago
  I've written a blog post about it. Here's the submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2272343 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2272343

haraball 16y ago

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

ashutoshm 16y ago

Using Google Groups To Backup Gmail http://www.googletutor.com/using-google-groups-to-backup-gmail/ http://www.googletutor.com/using-google-groups-to-backup-gma...