Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on April 10, 2007 by CyberNet.

Googling Google just posted about a Gmail suggestions site that I haven’t seen before. Previously I have always referred to this suggestion site that lists about 12 different options for you to choose from. Now, however, there is another suggestion site that has way more options available!

The reason why this is important is because the new site has one option in particular that really needs to be addressed. Towards the bottom of the suggestion page (in the Helpful Additions section) you’ll see a new option called “Export messages to a CD for storage.” This is something many Gmail users would love to have because it would offer a way for us to backup our email messages in case we have to go through a catastrophic failure that some users have been plagued with.

There are many other suggestions that I wanted to choose, but they only let you pick 5 of them at a time. They even have a section dedicated to integrating Gmail with other Google services, and they want to know which services you want to see integrated the most.

After carefully going through the 45 options available I decided on the following 5:

1. Hierarchy of Label system (i.e. sub-Labels)
2. Control who is added to my Contacts list
3. Ability to add or remove messages from conversations
4. Export messages to a CD for storage
5. Add notes to messages

A label hierarchy system would be really great because it would allow me to group similar labels, and this is something that I’ve wanted for a long time. I like having the labels instead of just folders because I can easily apply multiple labels to some messages, but my list of labels is getting too long and I need an easier way to keep my labels organized.

So which 5 features available on the list did you vote for?

Go cast your vote for the 5 best features you want in Gmail!

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This article was written on December 28, 2006 by CyberNet.

Gmail is at it yet again and this time they are performing magic tricks that many of us have never seen first-hand…they are making your email messages disappear before your very eyes! Hey, I never said it was a positive magic trick, now did I?

TechCrunch reported on this happening earlier today and received this response from Google regarding the situation:

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.

We know how important Gmail is to our users — we use it ourselves for our corporate email. We have extensive safeguards in place to protect email stored with Gmail and we are confident that this is a small and isolated incident.

What’s really interesting to read is in the Google Group where this is all going on. Here are three quotes from one particular user (I put key points in bold):

The point you helpful souls are missing is that we lost ALL our messages – ALL of them, get it?  I lost over a thousand – from every single folder, including SPAM (not that I care). I’m getting bored with links to the gmail self-help pages – what I want are solid data.  Problem determination and problem source identification.  Here are the facts as I have them so far:

 (1) On or about 12/17-12/18 a number of gmail users (so far at least five, by my count) lost the entire contents of their accounts, including all messages in their inboxes, their sent messages, their archives, their spam, and even thir contacts and signatures.

(2) More than one of us use Firefox2 as our browser

(3) I personally had left a browser window open to my gmail account over the time this occurred.  (Yes, it was secure, no one else had access to the system)

(4) I have a screen cap of over 100 instances of Firefox complaining that a script was running slowly on the inbox.  This was not a script that I started intentionally.

…

We are trying to identify and correct a potentially pervasive problem here – one that might be a bug in gmail, or a bug in Firefox, or a bug in how the browser interacts with gmail.

Later on he continues:

Now we have perhaps seven identifiable victims in the same time period. At least three using Firefox, at least one uses IE.  Also one user reports they have a “pwn3d” message – Deano.uk, I hope you saved that one! 

…

 Somehow we have to get Google’s attention or a lot more users could be at risk.

And then a few days later there is some restoration:

Status update: some email has been restored – from 12/10 through 12/17 – inbox and spam, but not sent mail.  Also got a note that Firefox 2.0.0.1 is out – fixes a couple remote exploit bugs.  I wonder, is this the one? http://nvd.nist.gov/nvd.cfm?cvename=CVE-2006-6507  Doesn’t explain why non-Firefox users saw lost email.  And what of our accounts, can they ever be secured again?

So there you have it, I would say that those three quotes summarize the story pretty well and show that only one-week worth of email was restored. The most interesting point that I wanted to make is that this might be related to Firefox 2.0.0.0 so it is highly recommended that you upgrade to Firefox 2.0.0.1 (if you use Firefox) to help ensure that this doesn’t happen to you.

I would be absolutely devastated if this happened to me because there are a lot of important messages in my Gmail Inbox, which leads me to another point. These online email services should offer some way to backup your email messages in case something catastrophic like this happens. It should be as simple as pushing a button and downloading a compressed file, but the peace-of-mind that it would give users would be priceless. This isn’t the first Google Group that I have seen started about this topic, either, which means something needs to happen to make me feel comfortable keeping my messages on their servers.

Anyone else feeling a little nervous when they visit their Gmail account now? After reading this I pulled up Gmail with my fingers crossed in hopes that my messages were still there…looks like I am okay, for now.

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