In its attempts to combat a volley of network spammers — Google accidentally disabled a number of innocent Gmail accounts…
Google this week mistakenly disabled the Gmail accounts of an undetermined number of users due to an apparently overzealous attempt by the company to combat spammers.
“On Wednesday night, people started reporting in the official Gmail Help Discussion forum that Google had locked them out of their accounts.”
Complaints began to flood Google’s message boards in the early hours of yesterday morning, when one user noted that when he tried to log in to his account, he got a message informing him that it had been disabled.
Some of you posted feedback that your Google Account was suddenly disabled. John Welch said when he tried to log-in yesterday, he received the following error:
Sorry, your account has been disabled. For more information about Google Accounts, please consult our Help Center at http://www.google.com/support/accounts/.
The complaints swiftly racked up as more and more users complained of being locked out of their accounts without explanation and having to helplessly watch mail sent to their Gmail accounts bounced back to the sender.
Paul B. says, “Crap! I have been using gmail since 04, and I just convinced my wife to stop using outlook and start using gmail this weekend. With IMAP support I was easily able to get her old email into gmail and last night BOOM, “Sorry, your account has been disabled.” What the freak is going on!”
(I have contacted Google for comment and will update should they reply.)
Google seems to have predominately targeted newer accounts, with one user, RawheaD, noting, “It sounds like this just started today, and right around the same time.”
“The same thing happened to me with one of my accounts that I set up less than a week ago. I have four other Gmail accounts that I have had for a while, and they are all working.”
A Google staffer who patrols the forum and posts messages on behalf of the company acknowledged the existence of a problem at mid-afternoon Thursday.
“I understand that some of you have had a frustrating experience with your accounts being inappropriately disabled. Our team is aware of the problem, and our engineers are continuing to investigate,” this person, identified as Google Guide, wrote.
Several hours later, the Google staffer declared the problem fixed “Our efforts to prevent breaches of our Terms of Use caused a number of users to be incorrectly identified,” the staffer wrote.
Update: Google responds, saying (HTML’ified):
“Our goal has always been to keep Gmail free of people who abuse the service and to keep Gmail inboxes free of spam. We have been targeting a large network of spammers to keep them out of the Gmail system and accidentally disabled access to some other accounts. We have restored access to these accounts. We know how important Gmail is to our users, so we encourage them to report any issues to the Gmail Help Center so we can investigate and assist them.”
However, it seems that Gmail declined accepting messages sent to those accounts while they were disabled; informing senders with a “bounce-back” return notice. It is not clear if Gmail will automatically attempt to redeliver those rejected incoming messages.
Also, as recently as late Friday morning Eastern Time, some people were still complaining of being locked out of their accounts.
Google’s response to the complaints has been mixed, with some forum members claiming it has told them the technical difficulty is resolved, and others being informed that it is still being investigated.
Although the extent and scope of the problem is unclear, the discussion thread is at press time one of the longest in recent months, and is full of frantic pleas for help from affected people who use Gmail as their primary e-mail service for personal or work communications.
In a subsequent post to the forum, Google Guide provided more details about the situation, saying that it was the result of an effort to purge users who abuse the service, such as spammers.
“People whose accounts were disabled by mistake should have regained access to them already and no data should have been lost, the Google staffer wrote.”
In addition to the problem of disabled accounts, in the past month a steady stream of Gmail users’ have been complaining that when they get upgraded to the new version of the service, popularly called Gmail 2.0, the service becomes extremely slow, often fails to load pages and even crashes their browsers.
“One of several threads devoted to this issue in the Gmail Help Discussion forum continues growing, nearing 300 messages at press time.”
Gmail 2.0, which features an upgraded contacts manager and is designed to be faster and more stable, is based on what the company calls “a major structural code change.”
Gmail is not just a free Web mail service for individuals, but also part of the company’s Google Apps suite of hosted collaboration and communication applications suite, which is used by more than 100,000 organizations, mostly small businesses, as well as by hundreds of universities.
Google offers a service-level agreement of 99.9 percent uptime to people and organizations that sign up for the Premier edition of Google Apps, which costs US$50 per user per year.
“Google did not immediately reply to a request for comment.”