Lost access to the server yesterday morning with a server 500 error. Few hours later got back in but it was an emtpy account - the forums lit up with people having the same issue. The mods team were saying we'd all been hacked and people had wiped all our data and its out fault for not having secure enough passwords....
Anyway complained, had a (poor) response and so started from scratch. Fine.
Now tried to get on this morning and my account has been disabled. So not only have I lost loads of data (which I'll take the blame for - I should have had backups) but now I can't do any password resets etc.. and I'm probably losing new mails.
Not happy.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/27/gmail-accidentally-resetting-accounts-years-of-correspondence-v/
I use my Gmail only for work, which it is perfect for with conversations, easy attachment retreival, Google Docs integration, etc. Thankfully I've not been hit by this, but I think even if I were I wouldn't lose sleep over my work emails. My personal emails would be a different story altogether, but that's why I have those downloaded in Live Mail and keep backups!
It sounds like at least your data will be restored at some point Rivkid, I hope its sooner rather than later :(
Thanks for that link guys - although it sucks that I've got to rely on my trusty forums over their actual support people for info!
Fingers crossed I'll get my mail back - but to be honest if I don't I've only myself to blame for not backing up. Its the fact my account is now disabled, with no notificaiton of why or when its likely to be back thats really killing me....
Who thinks my own public facing Exchange 2010 server is going a bit too far? :)
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=29271
According to that Google are saying it's a "blip" then a paragraph or two later it says accounts compromised. I don't think Google know exactly what to blame. Thankfully my account wasn't on that was affected.
Mine is fine as well although this does happen just after I switched from pop to imap for my gmail account.
I might re-think that to be honest, at least with pop I've always got a local copy that is backed up to Mozy regularly.
and this, right here, is why I don't trust the cloud computing concept.
remove control and administration of the backup system from the person/people who will be shafted if it fails and you're asking for trouble IMO.
I hope you get your stuff back quickly Rivkid!
Cheers all :)
So into day 3 and finally 2 communications from Google. The first via email in response to my support request which was simply a template email explaining that if I've had my account disabled its for breaching their t's & c's blah blah blah - clearly they hadn't even bothered to read my request properly. Communication number 2 came when I tried to log in this morning:
QuoteSorry... account maintenance underway
We are currently working on your account because an error occurred with your mail storage. Your account data and messages are safe. However, you won't be able to log in until our team has finished.
We can't predict exactly how long this will take, but if you are still unable to access your account in 48 hours, please contact us with your username at gmail-maintenance@google.com . We apologise for the disruption.
So - really pleased they're promising to get my data back wasn't expecting that (although as one Google forumer pointed out 'you're claiming to have fixed 1/3rd of peoples accounts so far but not one person has been on here to confirm as yet' Its a fair point...)
On the other hand it does seem like I will have been without my email account for 5 days, with all email bouncing back to senders. I can only begin to imagine what people have been thinking - and the mailing lists and Yahoo groups I'm currently being removed from... I have to say I'm not sure moving forward I can live with that. I have a lot of important mail to that address and to simply bounce it back for 5 days isn't good enough. In fact when I think about it, its not even CLOSE to good enough. Yes its a free service - but its a free service they desperately want you to use over their competitors and yet I have to say I've had a hotmail account for about 4/5 years longer than my Gmail account and thats never gone down once in the whole time I've had it.
Not sure what the next move is, maybe a hosted exchange account?
EDIT:
Also just noticed I can now get back into my Google Docs / Calendar etc.. Awesome news - I had loads of appointments in the cal and loads of half written songs / wedding budget plan etc.. in the docs.
.....aaaaaaannnnndddd BACKUP! :)
Ahhh ok so actually this is better:
QuoteGmail back soon for everyone
Monday, February 28, 2011 | 6:30 PM
Posted by Ben Treynor, VP Engineering and Site Reliability Czar (24x7)
Imagine the sinking feeling of logging in to your Gmail account and finding it empty. That's what happened to 0.02% of Gmail users yesterday, and we're very sorry. The good news is that email was never lost and we've restored access for many of those affected. Though it may take longer than we originally expected, we're making good progress and things should be back to normal for everyone soon.
I know what some of you are thinking: how could this happen if we have multiple copies of your data, in multiple data centers? Well, in some rare instances software bugs can affect several copies of the data. That's what happened here. Some copies of mail were deleted, and we've been hard at work over the last 30 hours getting it back for the people affected by this issue.
To protect your information from these unusual bugs, we also back it up to tape. Since the tapes are offline, they're protected from such software bugs. But restoring data from them also takes longer than transferring your requests to another data center, which is why it's taken us hours to get the email back instead of milliseconds.
So what caused this problem? We released a storage software update that introduced the unexpected bug, which caused 0.02% of Gmail users to temporarily lose access to their email. When we discovered the problem, we immediately stopped the deployment of the new software and reverted to the old version.
As always, we'll post a detailed incident report outlining what happened to the Apps Status Dashboard, as well as the corrective actions we're taking to help prevent it from occurring again. If you were affected by this issue, it's important to note that email sent to you between 6:00 PM PST on February 27 and 2:00 PM PST on February 28 was likely not delivered to your mailbox, and the senders would have received a notification that their messages weren't delivered.
Thanks for bearing with us as we fix this, and sorry again for the scare.
See now to be fair - expertly done. I'm no longer annoyed - its a bug, it happens, I've been there. I'm also VERY pleased to hear that the bounce back issue only lasted for a day (just happened to be when I tested). All of a sudden its not so bad - huge difference between 1 day and 5 for an issue like that. Why this couldn't have been communicated right at the start though I am baffled by - they could have saved themselves an awful lot of critiscm and their users lot of panic. Right well - look forward to getting my account back! :)
I'm back baby!!
All my old data is there, newer data is slowly filling back up (i.e. data recieved while the account was offline).
Have now setup hotmail to pop3 the whole mailbox so I've got it all in 2 systems.
Happy to have it all back - but being offline for 5/6 days is not great. Still undecided whether to stick with them or move. I really like Gmail but in fairness to Hotmail I've never ever not been able to use it.
I quickly signed up for Backupify after hearing this.
https://app.backupify.com/