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Gmail Glitch Is Causing 1000s Of Emails To Be Sent To One Man’s Hotmail Account
- TrainedMonkey 13y agoThis 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.
- VMG 13y agoThe 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 13y agoBut, 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 13y agoI am not sure it's a glitch. It could be someone link bombed it.
- hcarvalhoalves 13y agoThat's priceless. I would sell all inbound addresses on the spam market as high-quality leads. >:)
- eli 13y agoThose 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.
- 0x0 13y agoIf they are actually composing and sending an email without checking what's going on, I guess that says something about those users' personalities... :)
- hcarvalhoalves 13y agoYou got it. evil laugh
- bhhaskin 13y agoThat is great! Poor guy.
- vezzy-fnord 13y agoThis 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 13y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/867-5309/Jenny#Popularity_and_litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/867-5309/Jenny#Popularity_and_...
- rubycowgames 13y agoBad sitelink (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/47334?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/47334?hl=en) selection there.
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- gfodor 13y agoif this happened to me i would probably ask myself if i am living in a simulation or something.
- joaorj 13y agohow could this be a sign that you are living in a simulation?
- gfodor 13y agoif 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 13y agoThis 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!
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- vezzy-fnord 13y agoWhat 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 13y agoQuite a few browsers do not have a "search bar on the top right". They use a single field for both URL and search.
- Shish2k 13y agoI 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"? :|)
- dubcanada 13y agoI've watched people go to the firefox homepage (which is Google) and google google, then click on a sponsored ad. I've also seen people go to bing and bing google go to google then google hotmail and then go to hotmail. I'm a bit at a lose for words...
- VMG 13y agoThis 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 13y agoSomeone's getting fired tonight.
- deletes 13y agoDoes google fire over single( assuming ) mistakes. I didn't think they were that kind of company. Isn't there a voting to determine that?
- birken 13y agoThere is no way Google (or I assume any good employer) would fire an employee would for such a mistake. Mistakes happen, they are a part of life in the technical world. You work really hard to make sure the mistakes are minor (which this one is) and fixable, but they are going to happen. Losing data is really really bad, and if it happens it better be minor and there better be extreme circumstances. If a service goes down, that is bad but shit happens sometimes. Something minor like this is going to make for an entertaining post-mortem, but nothing more. I'm sure Google will do something nice for the person who was affected by it. Easy rule of thumb for operations: Never make the same mistake twice. You learn from every mistake, but new and amazing ways for things to break are always going to happen. Source: I worked at Google in operations and made mistakes that were far worse than this
- zeidrich 13y agoFiring people for making mistakes is a surefire way to ensure that when someone makes a mistake they will do everything they can to cover it up rather than take appropriate action to correct it.
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- danrockwelljr 13y agoIt'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.
- dudus 13y agoI agree it seems more like a Google Search glitch. The title should be updated.
- yaw 13y agoYesterday 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 13y agooff 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.
- dclara 13y agoI 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 http://bit.ly/1fcluBA: 900,000 (2010)
- dangrossman 13y 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.
- dclara 13y agoI agree with you and 0x0 below. But is the number of query keywords so critical which cannot be released to the owner? I remember that it was shown to everybody when we type keywords and I think that's helpful information to users and to the site owners. I know if the number is released, the site owners can cheat: "Create networks of fake sites to provide backlinks on popular keywords". This is really the problem of the current SEO. I have a report discussing about that: http://bit.ly/1fcOp8I http://bit.ly/1fcOp8I
- userbinator 13y agoI don't agree that Google should be the one doing this, most browsers have a setting for referer like off/on/same-domain-only and if someone wants privacy they can set it the way they like. It's also extremely irritating if you're copying a link to the site from Google.
- daviddoran 13y agoThe 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.
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- mattparcher 13y agoThis 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.
- yeukhon 13y agoBut then this is surprisingly quick. A few years back support email could take a month... that was my experience.
- baconner 13y agoLet me guess nsa@hotmail.com?
- jfb 13y agoThe one guy on the Internet who is happy that Google fell over today?
- ashishb4u 13y agoI see jeff.morse@d214.org
- thrownaway2424 13y agoHopefully Google will send this innocent bystander a valuable collectible Scroogled mug.
- bitstorm999 13y agoAnd the other link on the search results page [Gmail - Google] points to material@asvd.sasf.ch
- systems 13y agoemails can sometime include passwords or pass reset link this is extrememly dangerous how can we find out if we were affected
- sejje 13y agoHe's not getting emails addressed to you, relax and read about the actual bug.
- rajbala 13y agoThat guy should buy a lottery ticket posthaste.
- Kluny 13y agoThey'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.
- jsmthrowaway 13y agoI 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 13y agoThe only thing was put was email address, tech crunch just tested the link.
- ceejayoz 13y agoYes, 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-shot-2014-01-24-at-3-07-49-pm.png?w=640&h=379 http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/screen-s...
- TallGuyShort 13y agoHe's referring to the default contents of the email when that TechCrunch employee starts composing an email.
- clarkm 13y agoI 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.
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- edavis 13y agoIt'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.
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- izzydata 13y agoI sent him an email. I'm pretty sure that's what this article was wanting me to do.
- btown 13y agoI wonder if someone messed up the robots.txt on Gmail - and then their crawler started indexing individuals' Gmail accounts?
- maxerickson 13y agoThe crawler hopefully wouldn't be logged in as everyone. I guess the links are just posted to pages by accident.
- blauwbilgorgel 13y agoI 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/ 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 13y agoIt'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 http://pastebin.com/X1yTW7Pr
- krapp 13y agoNot to worry though. By the time Google's driving our cars for us, glitches like this will have been sorted out.
- erichurkman 13y agoRepeat 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 13y agoFor 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 13y agoSeems fixed, I google gmail and I don't see the link.
- knassy 13y agoAnd he lives in Wyoming right?
- yeukhon 13y agohttps://www.google.com/#q=site:mail.google.com+gmail+inurl:%3Fto%3D+google https://www.google.com/#q=site:mail.google.com+gmail+inurl:%... https://www.google.com/#q=site:mail.google.com+gmail+inurl:%3Fto%3D+yeukhon https://www.google.com/#q=site:mail.google.com+gmail+inurl:%... this one has a template
- nollidge 13y agoI 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 13y agoThe poor "upgrade" script, which was the reason for the outage, confused that guy's address with NSA's. Tragic story.
- presspot 13y agoThis is what stands for news at Techcrunch?
- coreymgilmore 13y agoI must say, all the news about this outage is crazy. Emailing random people, strange search indexing, gmail down for 1+ hour! Nutty
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- mariuolo 13y agoThe 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.