Google disables Gmail accounts by mistake

by Juan Carlos Peréz

December 7, 2007 —

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.

A Google staffer who patrols the forum and posts messages on behalf of the
company acknowledged
the existence of a problem at midafternoon 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.

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.

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's 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 didn't immediately reply to a request for comment.

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 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 isn't 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.

IDG News Service