Gmail Woes Come to Light
9:50 pm December 28th, 2006 by Sal Cangeloso
Today there were a number of very troubling posts concerning Google’s Gmail webmail service. Both TechCrunch and Gigaom reported how a number of Gmail accounts have been deleted with no hope of restoration. As a Gmail fan and someone who relies on it for personal email this is more than a bit troubling.
The word on the street is that a number of email accounts (about 60) were removed and that it is Google’s policy not to restore deleted accounts. There is no word on why this happened, but some people blame it on a Firefox 2.0 error, and ultimately it just means that a few people are out of luck and a lot of people are concerned. A Google rep was nice enough to email TechCrunch saying how many accounts were affected and that they did whatever they could to remedy the situation for those users.
I rely heavily on Gmail and generally see it as a very secure communications tool. My reasoning has always been that despite having my own server the chance of something going wrong with Google’s mail, the same one they use for their corporate communications, is relatively small. I know people are going to scoff at this and say to never trust your email to anyone else or the anyone who does not backup their email locally is stupid, but many people use Gmail as their backup. Still others use Gmail for their domain or have added other accounts to their Gmail (Mail Fetcher), both programs that I access to and have been considering. It goes without saying that these people, myself included, are more than a bit disturbed by what was revealed today.
The question that immediately comes to mind is- what to do for now? I would say that for the time being continue using Gmail normally and make sure your password/security practices are as strong as possible. Also, using a email client like Thunderbird or Outlook, back up your email using POP. I just set this up recently and it is a tedious process, but it does offer some piece of mind. Google seems to have limited each download to about 380-500 emails at a time (this seems to be restriction to download size) so it has been taking me a long time to get through all that email, but it’s worth it. It turns out that I have been using Gmail since 6/17/04, so that is a lot downloading even with my occasional pruning and mass spam deletions…
What can Google do to help with these problems? It seems that they have done what they can with the current situation, but looking past that there are still things that will help make Gmail more useful and more reliable. First of all, make it official! Gmail is still in beta after all this time and despite its being a huge success. Google really needs to get on this as soon as possible. Next they should offer some sort of backup/export tool in which email can be handed off to a client, backup server, or local machine without problems or dealing with POP. Next offer a paid service in which people that rely on Gmail could have some reassurances along with tech support and the option for more (hopefully unlimited) storage. There are a lot of other things people asking for, like IMAP support, in-line spell checking, an offline client, some way to import mail, page customization, and more, but those mentioned before are the deal breakers.
This situation has probably shaken a lot of people’s faith in Gmail, and rightfully so because the loss of an email account that is connected to so many things (bank account, credit cards, retailers, work, etc) along with the stored email associated with it can be a major ordeal. Personally I will be sticking with Gmail though I will be backing up periodically, and I will definitely be reconsidering consolidating my work emails with my Gmail account.
One thing I’ll note is that this is one of the reasons gmail is still in beta instead of being released as finished. Another is that all of the new feature requests.
Finally the last element is which countries laws will be followed in regards to email retention, privacy and so on should the offer gmail domains as a commercial product. Furthermore, they loose all of the advertising revenue they get along with the data that’s being collected that helps them tune the search/advert algorythims because once it becomes a commercial product, they then have to support it and people are not going to be willing to accept adverts (even googles plain text links)in THEIR email.
The other issue is by remaining as beta, Google doesn’t have to provide any guaranty that you’re email will be available tomorow and that they can discontinue the service at any time w/o notice. So my recomendation is to use the Pop3 access that’s been available for some time and perform a local backup to your preferred email client as I’ve been doing since the pop3 access became available.
Like said, it’s beta. And in any case, even with released software/products, you should always back up. Those who don’t- will (as soon as they lose data). I don’t see why you complain that POP3 is a pain. It’s one of the simplest protocols to set up. You need, what a username, password, AND server name?!? Oh no!
I personally use Gmail because I like the search function meaning I don’t have to go through and sort the mail into different folders (I am not very organised). The interesting thing here though is that I backup my email using Opera browser’s integral email system; this is also great because Opera’s browser comes with an excellent email system focussing on it’s very fast search engine and labelling system similar to Google’s. This means I get Gmail backed up locally to Opera’s mail system which still uses the same concept of not having to file things away religiously in an orderly manner – yet using both of their very powerful search and labelling functionality.
Opera’s not too bad a browser either.
I can see why people would be upset at losing there email accounts and email but….no one is immune from this. I work at a very large pharmaceutical company and even they will sometimes lose email. That’s what backups are for. Systems fail and one should always plan for them.
[...] Well, there have been a few incidents lately. And some accounts were, uh, deleted. But everything is better, right? Well, most of the issues have been addressed very quickly, but it seems like everything is not perfect. Today Gmail was down for some time, according to a few different sources. Personally I did not experience any outage, but this is not confidence inspiring. I did notice that Google Calendar was loading extremely slowly all evening, something else which is problematic. I can’t really say whether Gmail went down for me or not because I have been keeping myself logged out whenever I am not using it. Normally Gmail is always open in a browser window so I can check it frequently, but after reading about more security problems, including another XSS issue, I have put Gmail on lockdown. I won’t lie, this is a major hassle, because it also keeps me logged out of Calendar and Reader, so I have to log in an out of all three all day long. [...]
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