6 Comments

Reports of mass Gmail email deletion

December 29, 2006 by in Stupid,Tech with 6 Comments

I caught whiff of his jarring news over on TechCrunch concerning a small number of users reporting that all of their messages within their Gmail accounts was deleted without explanation. The original source of complaints was sourced to a Google Group where users sought answers for their surprising new problem(s).

Google’s official explanation for the incident:

Regretfully, a small number of our users — around 60 — lost some or all of their email received prior to December 18th. Once we found out about this issue, we worked day and night to confirm that only a few accounts were affected and to do whatever we could to restore as much of the users’ accounts as we could. We’ve also reached out to the people who were affected to apologize and to work with them to restore the email from any personal backup they might have.

Does hearing this make any readers cringe? I imagine a number of individuals rely on their free Gmail accounts as their main email account. Personally, news of the incident prompted me to download all of my current messages via POP – just in case.


  • http://acecombine.com dov

    still have 2464 emails..
    6% of my 2,8GB :D

  • jeremiah johnson

    that’s why there’s a “beta” label on the site.

  • Jerry

    And that’s why it’s free.

  • http://www.the8thsign.com Alec

    I have 2 Gmail accounts, one personal and one hosted that i forward to a 3rd Gmail account then download all my mail from that 3rd account via POP.

  • Paul

    Use gmail every day, still got my many thousands of e-mails right back to 2004. Apparently it was only around 60 accounts which were effected. I have seen people pay for mail and get less service. Nothing ever goes wrong with gmail so no need to contact.

    I also have gmail open most of the time in a firefox tab like just now, running FF 2 as well!

  • http://www.nothing.net.nz mike

    Has anyone developed a gmail backup tool or something similar?

    I would really like to back up my mail at some point, but can’t be arsed using POP to drag down the 10,000 odd emails that are sitting there..

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