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GMail Horror Story

blog.outer-court.com — This guy used to use gmail as his primary account and kept there important letters. One day his account just disappeared. All his data is lost and nobody knows why! I start to worry...

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  • bossmanthe, on 10/12/2007, -100/+27My thinking - If the infomation is that important, get a real mail account! no Digg
    • CapitolK, on 10/12/2007, -3/+47You know, gmail has a great POP3 system that allows you to have a local email program download all your messages, without deleting them from the gmail web interface.

      While more people should take advantage of that to protect their data, google really shouldn't be deleting gmail accounts for no reason... Definitely digg++. Hopefully it will help get google's attention, so that (if necessary) it can fix whatever caused this (and maybe make it less likely to happen to you!)
    • Dradis, on 10/12/2007, -1/+38"I have over 300mb of CRUCIAL data in my email, none of which I have backups for. "
      His mistake wasn't using GMail as his primary email, his mistake was not having backups for his important data.
      I think we all learn that lesson the hard way.
    • hungryJonJon, on 10/12/2007, -19/+5so true. I POP3 it every night when I get home. it's free, why wouldn't you? and my gmail account is my junk account anyways. This guy is an absolute fool.
    • meson2k, on 10/12/2007, -10/+2I agree.. I am seriously thinking about getting a paid account as I cannot afford to loose my gmail. I didn't intend for it to be my primary account, but over time it has become one of my most used email accounts. Gosh.. Whatever happened to "do no evil". That's all crap..

      The poor guy lost ALL HIS EMAIL. And, to think, it was all his PERSONAL information in it. How can Google on anyone else deny you access to information that is YOURs. Isn't that a violation of your rights?
    • headswine, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6I just use Gmail to process my spam, which runs at about 11,000 pieces per 30 day period. I forward all other mail to my regular pop account so Gmail just acts as a spam filter and archival. But never my main backup.

      Why do people expect so much from free services?

      http://www.presenternet.com
  • norbiu, on 10/12/2007, -35/+35horror story? please! somebody cracked his password and deleted his account.
    • galfridus73, on 10/12/2007, -8/+26You're right... the error message is consistent with an account that was deleted by the user or someone posing as the user.
    • tayboo, on 10/12/2007, -11/+7google wouldn't delete an account without warning
  • Stockwell, on 10/12/2007, -104/+18Oh pls. How can you be so stupid to use an online mail account as your primary !!! Duh!!!!
    I use my Gmail account for unimportant things.
    A good old local email client (let's say Thunderbird) is a safer bet on keeping your info.

    People can be SO stupid (was he a US-citizen by any chance?????? hehe)
    No DIGG.
  • yonbeastie, on 10/12/2007, -5/+64It seems to me that while accidents do happen (even with GMail), the risk of losing the data on your personal hard drive is far greater than GMail flubbing and losing data on theirs. Just a thought...

    Important documents should have a hard copy!! ;)
    • eadnams, on 10/12/2007, -4/+6As an aside:
      Oddly enough, at my work place (One of the largest computer companies in north america) 'Hard Copies' are the digital ones and 'soft copies' are the paper versions... gotta love the technological revolution :)
    • zefer, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4QUOTE: 'Hard Copies' are the digital ones and 'soft copies' are the paper versions

      geez, that could get confusing!
    • armcurl, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8QUOTE: 'Hard Copies' are the digital ones and 'soft copies' are the paper versions

      What an odd coincidence!
      At my work place 'Hard drives' are spiral bound and sit on your desk, while notepads have an OS installed on them and live in a big beige box underneath. We also call the dark bit when we go to sleep 'day', and the light bit when we're awake 'night' !
      What a crazy, mixed up world we live in.
    • eadnams, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0its a question of whats more permanent... where I work... Digital Copies are far less perishable than paper, which vanishes all the time. I suppose its the whole paperless workplace thing, we barely use paper because it can be lost.
  • mrASSMAN, on 10/12/2007, -9/+27gmail just happens to be the only usable online email service on the internet. sometimes i wonder how we got by when it didnt exist.
  • norick, on 10/12/2007, -10/+18It really scares me to death, because if my email account is deleted, damn i am dead.
    • designerjoe, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12Just make sure that you have all the info that is important backed up. Any important contacts I have in one main address book. I wouldn't use gmail for business.
    • norick, on 10/12/2007, -3/+15I just installed thunderbird, just in case, i am backing up all my mails.
    • CovardeAnonimo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15configure your gmail account to use POP3 _and_ keep a copy at their servers. set up mozilla suite or thunderbird according to the instructions on gmail's help and download a copy to your computer.

      you'll still be able to access your mail from anywhere with an internet terminal, plus you have your own offline backup in case you need it.
    • lnxaddct, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8Preliminary findings appear to conclude that this guy's password was stolen or guessed, someone logged into his account and deleted it. So keep your password safe, but also backup your email now and then using GMail's pop interface.
      Regards,
      Steve
    • mzhao, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2This is scary because I got the same error message just now. My account's still fine, though, so I hope it'll work out.
  • arkanoid, on 10/12/2007, -19/+6I can't access gmail main page since yesterday. Ask myself WTF is happening.
  • wayjer, on 10/12/2007, -40/+8Coffee splattered all over my screen from my mouth reading this story!
    • wayjer, on 10/12/2007, -39/+4all cleaned up now.
    • starsky51, on 10/12/2007, -8/+33I keep hearing this 'spat my coffee out' comment and i just can't believe it happens. these must be the same geeks that actually 'Roll On the Floor Laughing'.
    • strictnein, on 10/12/2007, -23/+8ROFL!
    • beatniak, on 10/12/2007, -24/+5hehe... ROFL starsky
    • armcurl, on 10/12/2007, -10/+1C | N > K

      ;)
  • norbiu, on 10/12/2007, -59/+9things like this happen EVERY SINGLE DAY and yes, even to google so please get over it! this story has no place on the front page.
    • wayjer, on 10/12/2007, -12/+18I think the masses will disagree with you Jack
    • norbiu, on 10/12/2007, -35/+3still belive that ?
    • wayjer, on 10/12/2007, -5/+8yes, I do, it is all just a fancy light show in here just like the regular media, it is about google and it is hot, therefore the masses will digg it. I don't agree with the idea of this story being on here either, but as they used to say in the newspaper business, it sells papers!
    • Odweaver, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I agree, people lose data every day, it is a very common occurance. Was this mass deletion? No, it was an isolated incident, now if there is a mass deletion it should be front page, also it is unknown if Google was actually at fault, there is a chance it got hacked and deleted simple as that.

      The moral to this story is always have backups of important crap, buy a large usb drive or an external hard drive and keep data on thier along with your normal harddrive, and if it is really that vital, why don't you have a hard copy in a firesafe?
  • xuna, on 10/12/2007, -2/+15I use GMail as my primary account and I feel good about it. What do you mean by "get a real account", people that use IMAP also trust the server to not loose their stuff...
    • konrad8ha, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6How about using IMAP with local offline copies? That's what I do and it works wonders for me. Additionaly I'd never trust anything besides an eMail-account on my own domain with my really important mails. Of course it doesn't provide 100% security as well, but I feel like this is more trustworthy than some mega-corporation like Google.
    • Boondoggle, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2When Gmail supports IMAP I'll consider it "real" email. Web interfaces are fine for intermittent use. Blows cheese compared to a "real" email client with full searching, smart folders and IMAP.
    • ucg1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3When the IMAP server is my own server which has daily backups for the last month (plus monthly backups for the last year), and has redundant backups off-site, I think I trust it very much. Even if it wasn't my own server, it is very very easy to setup backups with an IMAP account, even if all you have access to is IMAP. Or you can look for a provider that does backups for you, but I would always do my own in addition to that.
  • illynova, on 10/12/2007, -1/+32Something tells me this guy isn't telling the whole story....
    • databyss, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3What do you propose, oh primary proposer of proposals?
  • jtdgrz, on 10/12/2007, -4/+11This just seems stupid to me. If you have important files, you back them up, just like you always do with ANY important file. Why the hell would you just leave it sitting on a third party's server? GMail gives you POP3 capabilities, USE IT if you need to. Especially these days when people are cracking passwords left and right, you need to keep your data safe... Dugg because stupidity never ceases to amaze me.
    • plumeria, on 10/12/2007, -6/+2Although I do not agree with the language used in your comment, I digg it because I agree with the point it puts across.
    • databyss, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1I trust google as much as the next guy, but i still backup my gmail.

      I trust my hard drives the same way, yet I still backup important data on them.
  • celsdogg, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4OR, you can have the best of both worlds. pop your gmail. it can be done, their are instructions on the help page (they dont use ports 25 and 110, so the instructions are very helpful)

    that way, you have it, and its also available thru the gmail web client. . .
    • njbair, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2That's exactly what I do. If you do it, though, understand that your first time getting mail will retrieve ALL your messages from the Gmail server unless you specify otherwise. In other words, it may take a while.
    • celsdogg, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1i shoulda said to enable leave a messages on the server.

      and yeah, it will take awhile.. .
  • xLiKx, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4if the emails were so important, he should've backed them up by saving the docs or printing them. it's common sense.
  • Ghengis, on 10/12/2007, -7/+12Um, gmail is BETA!!! You don't keep important stuff on/in BETA software.
    • Gnascher, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4What BETA means in this case is that there may be bugs.

      I don't know if this fellow hit a bug, if thier database somehow got corrupted, or someone actively hit the 'delete' key. However, with BETA software, there is no warranty implied or otherwise.

      Yes, GMail is great ... but I personally wouldn't use a web-based email account for anything besides a backup. Personally, I have an email account with my own domain name, and hosted at the same location as my website. I have that email address configured to forward a copy of every email I receive to my GMail account ... this means I have redundancy. One copy on Thunderbird (local copy backed up to another hard-drive on another machine nightly using ntbackup), and another copy at GMail.

      This ensures that my critical emails would take a triple failure to be lost. Learn a lesson from this guy's problem ... REDUNDANCY IS GOOD FOR CRITICAL INFORMATION.
  • asdren, on 10/12/2007, -11/+6if it's important make backups. no digg.
  • Nagash, on 10/12/2007, -18/+7No Pity,
    People need to get burned in this way.
    gmail is BETA and its FREE.
    That means that you cannot trust it at all with important stuff. Sort of common sense. But I see alot of people missing that.
    This deserves a DUMB ASS tag....
    • phae, on 10/12/2007, -9/+2This is Digg, not Fark. No dumbass tag, sorry!
    • Pyroxene, on 10/12/2007, -8/+5No digg. To me, Beta means experimental. Never substitute experimental as production.
  • celeb, on 10/12/2007, -14/+3too bad Google dosen't make it possible to backup all data held on their servers to local workstations...
    • Ghengis, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5You could do the POP thing and have all your gmail saved locally ;-) Or, maybe my sarcasm meter's broken.
    • Eaglefire, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4But they do. POP access allows downloading all e-mail from your Gmail account to a local computer.
  • norbiu, on 10/12/2007, -10/+5exactly ! get this thing off the front page !!!
  • modian, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5Set up your gmail for pop3 access: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=1555
  • dlawrence, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2I mean no offense... But it really isn't a good idea to keep all of your critical messages in one place. Especially a web mail service that is clearly marked as a beta. People seem to forget that betas don't always work as they should.
  • Choaderboy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6I'm glad this got to the front page - people need to be educated about backups. Having worked for several years on a University helpdesk, you would be surprised by the number of people who keep a years worth of dissertation work on a single floppy, which then gets accidentally put through the washing machine, eaten by the dog or lost.

    A free mail server (in beta no less!) is no better.
    • norbiu, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3people won't learn ... until it happens to them
    • philwjan, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Not even then. Believe me. I know disturbingly many people who consider it a given, that their box keels over every couple'a months an they lose all their stuff. The thought to burn at least the vital documents on CD once in a while has never even occured to them.
  • murphyrulez, on 10/12/2007, -3/+0I POP3 my gmail every couple of days. Then you have a copy of everything, every sent mail, every attachment. You can then browse it later offline if you need to, or save it to an external hard drive.

  • moisie, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3Personally I use gmail by pop3 as well as a backup - it's free so I can hardly argue.
  • MoeB, on 10/12/2007, -9/+5google stole his information in order to sell it to advertisors :D duh
  • mark1372, on 10/12/2007, -6/+2Yoda wrote the description, he did.
  • Seafoodplate, on 10/12/2007, -13/+4If you are not paying for your email, you have no reason to complain when this happens.
    • turbopro, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5um, sure you do. Its a service that is provided free of charge. Its still a service, if you dont complain then they will not know how to fix it. That is what the term BETA is all about.
    • Oniony, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7This is crap. Just because something is 'free' does not remove all of your rights to (or expectations of) a quality service. Your rights come down to the service contract you sign up to -- whether you're paying for the service or not. Most free services will offer the user little rights as they get no direct remuneration but that is not always the case. Some providers are willing to offer a first rate service for no money as they'll make their money in other ways such as advertising revenue, building their brand, selling your user data, &c.

      Bob may have been wrong to assume more from the service than he possibly got, but that still does not make this 'you got what you deserved because it's free' attitude any more helpful.

      Brand trust is a big thing, and almost every user will expect a certain quality from a free service from a big name.
    • Frebis, on 10/12/2007, -12/+4Its free, you really have no reason to complain. Say somone gives you a free sandwhich, it's ham....but you wanted turkey. Do You Complain???? No, you eat it, and move on in life. And this article, ladies and gentleman is why I do not support open source/free anything!
    • Oniony, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Yeah, say McDonald's gives you a free McChicken sandwich as part of their promotion. You eat it, you have diarrhoea for two weeks. Now what are you going to do, say "No matter, it was free." Your analogy is fundamentally flawed, it's not about them giving you the *wrong* product, it's about you having expectations (because of the stature of the brand) as to its *quality*.

      It'd be a different matter if the sandwich was given to you by a individual person on the street -- you likely wouldn't trust the source as you have no knowledge of the person.
  • HarryBauzonia, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11Only a bonehead would rely on some third-party server or even email for storage of important documents. He created his own horror story.
    In any case, he could have used his pop client (they do provide a pop server) and it wouldn't have mattered if Google deleted anything.
  • huffapuff, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2me thinks that "Bob-eMail-Nomore" is workin' for an opposing faction to google (oohhh i don't know Microsoft?)... it just doesn't seem right, and if it were to happen, i would think that google tech support could resolve it... but to post it on blogoscope and then digg that-> I mean its practically all over the world by now-> a great way to negatively advertise... just a thought...
  • Angryviking, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Seen the same thing happen with Yahoo and Hotmail accounts. Never seems to be a logical explaination.
  • Monoman, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9Two lessons learned.

    1. Do not use a BETA product as a primary tool.
    2. Always make BACKUPS of things that are truly important.

    • tomhung, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1beta is fine. most of linux is beta. just keep your records backed up!

      /me getting thunderbird installed
  • djjuice, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2This is why you NEVER rely or place important files without backups on a free email system.
    Lesson learned.
    I use gmail only to register my name on sites so my main mail account doesnt get flodded.
  • MasterDwarf, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I purposely avoid pop because of my frequent HD formats, potential for HD failure, and most importantly, viruses/spam. I have trusted online email accounts to a fault and hope this never occurs to me. I mean, Gmail's sole purpose is to never delete any email and to use a search function to reference anything. I think it's great but I keep my important stuff on another online email provider.
    • galfridus73, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Right, but if you back up from the online provider (by using POP) then your main copy is online and the backup is on your computer. So if you format your HD, just pop the mail off the server again.
    • MasterDwarf, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Problem is that I would prefer not to store 1GB+ of email on any type of medium, AND the search function is not as smooth as Google's. Not sure if the Google Desktop would fix this, but my preference is to keep it on someone elses servers and let them do the back ups.
    • NineTailedFox, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0Potential for hard drive failure? Your mail providers' hard drives, then, are presumably are protected by a Cloak of Crashlessness +3. I'd like a piece of that; which one do you use? ; )
  • norbiu, on 10/12/2007, -10/+4People, stop digging this, ffs. It's lame. Trusting ANY beta is just stupid. Submitting it to digg is even more stupid.
  • FZero, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2(sorry, I double posted due to an AJAX lag.)
  • FZero, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3Kids, take note: NEVER use a free service to store critical/secret/important information. You get what you pay for, even with google. I use gmail solely for discussion lists (and there's nothing better out there for this particular task!) but my main mail account is at my own domain.
  • Aeror, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1An hard drive crasch can happen to anybody. Did you expect google to keep an backup of every single mail?
  • nonokiaboy, on 10/12/2007, -7/+4Your mum uses Gmail.
  • prazgod, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Well the site is now down - gives a wordpress error -
  • DrWho, on 10/12/2007, -7/+3Beta, foos!
  • prazgod, on 10/12/2007, -5/+4All you base are mine, and his, and hers, and infact anyones who can guess a password!
  • number8888, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3The truth is that any emailing service (web-based, pop3, or etc.) has this risk, it's not just Gmail.
  • tito13kfm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10I can see a number of things which possibly happened.

    1) Somebody hacked his account (more than likely social hacking - exwife, friend, etc.) and deleted his account.
    2) He violated the terms and conditions and google took action.
    3) Google ***** up.

    Let this be a lesson to all. If you use your email for mission critical stuff, you might want to back it up. Hell if you use ANYTHING for mission critical stuff, you should make backups. Hell with the insane amount of invites you get you could just create hundreds of gmail accounts, have them all linked to something like username@yourdomain.com have 1 be the main forward, and the rest get cc'd and then you have hundreds of backups :).

    My website is just a forum and homepage for a WoW guild. Yet I still make weekly backups just in case.
    • Hurricane, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0Actually if you look at the account page in Gmail, it has a simple security question and then allows you to change the password.
      Hmmmmmm... ya think he may have done a ***** thing like used to easy of a question...????
  • OropheR, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Hotmail contents delete itself if you dont check your account for more than 3 months...No such thing with gmail.
    This digg is still hard to believe and if he had important data to save, then he should have made a HD back up.
  • BritOverseas, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4GMail is far better than the other "Free" offerings out there/ Hotmail 250 MB, Yahoo at 1GB (if you pay or ever have paid) blah blah.

    Also, a lot of companies block Hotmail and Yahoo (I know my clients do, but not Gmail) so there is no way to check your mail whilst in their offices, unless you use wireless 3G or such and even then a lot of my work is international and I am NOT paying those roaming data rates.

    So suck it up people, back up your data and stop whining..
    • doolittle, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Well, you can use a proxy to access hotmail / yahoo ;)
    • Hurricane, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yahoo now gives 1GB of storage to EVERYONE.

      I have used them (Yahoo) with the same account for 6 years and never seen anything like an account disappearing.
  • norbiu, on 10/12/2007, -11/+2I bet he violated the terms and he's not telling us...

    LAME ++++
  • JamesGlover, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3As others have stated the POP3 facility of Gmail is fantastic, and with a bit of configuration can allow you to seemlessly check mail on the web when out and about, and then via a POP client when at your own workstation, all the while ensuring that all past E-mails are always availible to you, backed up both on Google's servers and your local workstation.

    People who are suggesting that a local workstation is 'safer' way of archiving mail have clearly never lost an inbox worth of data. Wherever you store your mail accidents will happen, so back-ups are always a good thing. With Gmail there is the benifit that if you save on your workstation you always have an 'offsite' backup, so even in the event of say a housefire, your E-mails will still be safe.
  • Prod1gy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Look, the point isn't that he's complaining for deleted files from a free service. Its a good warning not to store important files on a free beta service, or atleast back them up. Its also a heads up: don't be surprised if you wake up and your gmail account is gone.
  • sophiaperennis, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I wouldn't rely on a free email service, even gmail, for crucial data. Furthermore, if Google gmail does not provide backup service for an email account, atleast use POP3 or IMAP for backup, to copy the email to your client machine.
  • Ares, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4dugg for the user comments in this thread.Sounds like an ID 10 T error.
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