Gmail user gets kneecapped
Bob at Google Blogoscoped had a bad day 
last week. He discovered that Google had deleted his entire Gmail account without warning.
It’s quite a disaster for him personally: “I use it religiously and it is my primary email account. I have over 300mb of CRUCIAL data in my email, none of which I have backups for.”
And it’s a reminder of two things for everyone else.
First, backups are golden. Whether you use webmail or Mail.app, a daily backup routine or mirror of your emails will save your bacon one day. Just ask Bob. Then find out what makes up a complete backup of your Mail.app data.
Secondly, Gmail has a statement in its terms of service that every Gmail user should read:
We may modify or terminate our services from time to time, for any reason, and without notice, including the right to terminate with or without notice, without liability to you, any other user or any third party. We reserve the right to modify these Terms of Service from time to time without notice…
…Google disclaims any and all responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, completeness, legality, reliability, or operability or availability of information or material displayed in the GOOGLE SERVICES results. Google disclaims any responsibility for the deletion, failure to store, misdelivery, or untimely delivery of any information or material.
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Tags: Apple Mail, backups, data security, email, GMAIL, mail.app, nasty surprise, terms of service
March 14th, 2006 at 2:52 am
This article about losing all your gmail saved mails is quite troubling.
The article does not explain what to do, if one wants to back up the saved gmail data.
Can you point us to an article which explains how we can protect ourselves?
- Dan, Chicago
March 14th, 2006 at 3:02 am
Hmm…. I don’t know.
I would probably make sure that I had a backup of all my messages in a desktop client like mail.app (or even Outlook
if you must), using the instructions here.
Or maybe you could get Gmail to forward every email it receives to another account. Does Gmail have a “re-direct” feature that would preserve the original sender and addressee? I’m not very experienced in the ways of Gmail, I’m afraid.
Maybe someone else will have a better idea.
What I would actually do is stop using Gmail.
My email is important to me, so I would use an email service with which I could establish a more reasonable contract than Gmail provides (see terms of service above), one that took some steps to protect my data. Personally, I use Fastmail
, not least because of its daily off-site backup policy.
March 14th, 2006 at 3:33 am
Use the POP protocol to fetch your Gmail into your mail application.
March 14th, 2006 at 3:59 am
I completely agree that everyone should keep their data backed-up regularly but but, up to what extent Google should do that and why? Google must justify the actions. After all, it’s a no-nonsense company!!
March 14th, 2006 at 4:53 am
What did Bob do? Did he piss off Google? Or did he abuse the service?
I find it hard to believe that Bob was just some random guy that got his account deleted. Could you please fill in the details before posting some kneejerk reaction article like this?
This isn’t very good reporting.
March 14th, 2006 at 5:01 am
[...] Escrito por csr el 13 Mar 2006 a las 07:01 pm | Archivado como: Leído por ahí… César (Tardáguila, no yo en un ataque de esquizofrenia) me pasa un enlace a una historia de miedo de un usuario de GMail al que un día le desapareció la cuenta de correo (con 300 megas de información dentro). Teniendo en cuenta que yo ya he pasado del giga, tres consideraciones: [...]
March 14th, 2006 at 6:37 am
Alex, here’s what Bob has to say…
“Again, I repeat, I *never* violated any of GMail’s terms of service.
If a Google rep would like to confirm this, they are more than welcome to. They have my alternate email address (which I used to create a support ticket).
This isn’t in any way a publicity stunt. It’s a real-life crisis I’m in, and while the purpose of this thread was to obtain advice and more information on how to resolve my problem, I hope it simultaneously serves to remind one and all of the vulnerability of services, especially those in beta.
Again, thank you very much for your words of support.”
March 14th, 2006 at 6:51 am
Hmmm…
I guess someone just discovered the inherent scariness of web based services (the hard way).
I don’t trust Google/SUN/M$ (it’s not personal, I don’t trust anyone other than me with my data). The network is NOT the computer.
Google may not be evil, but accidents can and do happen. Trusting 300MB of important data to an unknown 3rd party is just silly (especially to something specifically labeled as “beta”). If you don’t back-up your data regularly, you have no one to blame but yourself when your one and only copy goes “poof.” Harsh, but true.
March 14th, 2006 at 7:08 am
Gmail is still in beta. Duhhh.
March 14th, 2006 at 7:13 am
Having read the entire linked entry and all of its comments, what bothers me is Google’s lack of communication with Bob. They should at least respond to people having a problem, even if they can’t help them.
March 14th, 2006 at 7:56 am
My account got deleted too. (When I needed it most, because I was in a foreign country and didn’t have my email address book with me.)
My conclusion: no more GMail.
March 14th, 2006 at 8:15 am
And there was no warning at all?
March 14th, 2006 at 11:26 am
So what DID they say was the reason it was done? Do they have no answer for that? I would be curious to find out if, regardless of the author’s assurances, google feels the TOS has been broken and by what action.
March 14th, 2006 at 11:34 am
It looks to me as if Bob and Harry were given no warning or reason at all, which is part of the scandal of it all. Although we don’t know both sides of the story.
March 14th, 2006 at 3:38 pm
I feel for Bob. I had a little rant about this. Hat tip to you for keeping this alive.
March 14th, 2006 at 7:24 pm
Thats bad. Gmail should be responsible for this.
How can it just wipe away users mails like this?
March 14th, 2006 at 7:28 pm
As I understand it, Google reserves the right in its terms of service to do exactly that.
March 14th, 2006 at 7:35 pm
Looks right to you Tim. There was no warning.
I just used the account for ebay, some newsletters, to keep in touch with friends and sending and getting funny pictures and powerpoint files and flashanimations.
Maybe they didn’t like that I kept my email account clean. ;-)
Means: deleting my private mail, but not bothering to delete the spam folder with the thousands of spam mails every week. Never did it because I never could find out out how to delete all spam mails at once. Could only delete 100 spam mails at a time.
And repeating this step 30 times every 3-4 weeks…. why should I ?
March 14th, 2006 at 8:25 pm
What an awful thing to happen. It would be really nice to see a backup option on GMail and in fact on all web-services. Let me download all my data as a zipped XML file whenever I want and then at least I can easily be in control of of it.
March 14th, 2006 at 9:41 pm
this is a fake for me..
we have no proofs
and btw 1 on billions is not a real problem.. it’s more likely to win the lottery than loose gmail data…
btw make backup :P
March 15th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Don’t just ‘POP’ your gmail.
Here’s a sweet setup: Keep your mail on gmail, but also import them into mail.app. That way, you can just use mail.app at home, but gmail is both a live backup, your actual mail address, and a webmail interface for the 2 times in a year when you forgot to bring your iBook along. Okay, fine, as mac notebook user I haven’t used gmail as a form interface since I set it up, but the backup thing is still nice.
Again, do NOT just pop your gmail to do this! If you configure gmail to allow POP but to leave copies in gmail, your mail.app keeps fetching larger and larger lists every 5 minutes. At some point you’re downloading a meg just to check that you have no new mail.
Instead, create another gmail account, forward all mail from your main to this new one, and set this new gmail account to allow POP but to delete any mails that are POPped. Then point your mail.app to that gmail account’s POP. For backup purposes, pick up all gmails from your original once, using POP-but-dont-trash-messages, then turn off POP for your main account.
Works like a charm.
March 15th, 2006 at 12:38 am
What Reinier said is false. You will only get the new messages when doing POP. Gmail behaves differently than other servers.
“At some point you’re downloading a meg just to check that you have no new mail.” That statement is easily proven wrong if watch what your reader is doing.
I used POP and the web interface when away from my machine. My only slight gripe is that reading gmail messages over pop doesn’t mark them as read in the web interface.
March 15th, 2006 at 1:13 am
I manually talked POP to the gmail server about 4 months ago and back then it definitely spammed massive amounts of header numbers back, growing with every new mail received.
I’ll check out later what’s going on now.
March 15th, 2006 at 4:17 am
Well,
Simply forward a copy of all incoming email to a storage address. Gmail offers forwarding.
March 15th, 2006 at 5:39 am
Although email archives are surely important to all users, Google should not be liable for backing up everyone’s personal data. Mistakes do happen from time to time. Each and every one of gmail’s users acknowledged the beta version of gmail, myself included. If I agreed to take that risk, I will not complain. If Bob wanted a more reliable service, as suggested by other people that replied to this article, Bob should’ve gone somewhere else, perhaps pay a buck or two.
Without wanting to sound like a smart #$$, please consider the following:
Beta /n :
1. Mostly working, but still under test;
2. Anything that is new and experimental;
3. Flaky; dubious; suspect (since beta software is notoriously buggy).
Let’s not expect the coffee bought at McDonalds NOT to be hot! Face the consequences.
Only in America ….
March 15th, 2006 at 7:31 am
@Sammy: I think that’s right. Gmail do make the risks of using its service explicit in the terms of service.
I guess the injustice arises because people — unwisely perhaps — don’t read and consider terms of service agreements as much as they should, so that an unusual or unexpected condition takes them by surprise.
Which is an enormous shame for Bob and Harry and the rest.
March 16th, 2006 at 4:23 pm
[...] Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » Gmail user gets kneecapped What ??!! (tags: News) [...]
March 30th, 2006 at 7:55 am
[...] Do you use Gmail as your primary email account? If so, you may want to check out this article over at Hawk Wings. It tells the story of Bob, a Gmail user who unexpectedly had his Gmail account deleted… by Google… without warning. He lost everything. [...]
April 5th, 2006 at 1:05 am
Ok… I just had this done to me. My gmail account started by saying I either had wrong account name or password. I tried to restore the password, and it said that my account does not exist or hasnt been fully setup yet (Ive had gmail for over 2 years). So I went to “finish setting it up” and it said my user name is already in use! SOO… My account seems to be deleted, but I cant open that name up again! Anyone have a clue? I thought maybe someone hacked in and closed it… but why wouldnt it let me restart the service with the same name? I dont think I ever violated TOS. It was used for everyday emails!
September 23rd, 2006 at 4:00 am
Almost every website offering services has this disclaimer. It protects owners from being responsible when a service goes down, is deleted, etc…
If its a sold product, it would be different. Free products need to ensure they dont become liable for stuff, cause then it would cost them money when people get mad.