Are Gmail Deletions Much Ado About Nothing?
Published December 29th, 2006 in google, securityThere’s been quite a bit of hype about Gmail user’s emails being deleted. I first heard about this today, to be honest, and no, I haven’t been personally affected by this. There are a lot of different opinions on this as you can see by reading through the comment thread on the post I’ve linked to above and many alarmed and indignant responses.
I hesitate to enter the fray, but I’m coming down on the side that says this is much ado about nothing. Yes, before you burn me in effigy, this is a problem that should be taken seriously by Google and I’m sure it will be. However, it appears to me in my semi-educated opinion that this is most likely due to a malicious exploitation of a known bug with the Firefox browser that may or may not have already been addressed.
As to the number of accounts affected, 60 is not a lot. To those whose emails were deleted, this could be a very big deal, but in the scheme of things 60 users affected out of several million at least, is not a huge problem. I regularly work with database and transaction processing systems that involve many thousands of users and transactions per day. If a problem is reported to me, my first question is how many users or accounts is it affecting? If the answer to this question is one user or just a few accounts, I don’t get too worked up over it.
That’s not to say that I don’t immediately begin working on the problem and taking steps to prevent it from causing further damage. Every problem is potentially serious, but you have to realize that something that affects a very small number of users isn’t something to convene a grand jury over. Google is obviously concerned and is working on some sort of solution. I’m not impressed by Google’s corporate policy of mysterious statements from the Wizard’s Tower, but in this case, it’s hard to imagine them coming out with much detail at this point, especially if that gives others with malicious intent the information necessary to repeat the exploit.
I can’t end without stating also that you as a user are ultimately responsible for your own data and if it’s data that you can’t afford to live without, such as important business emails, etc, then you are responsible for making sure that this data is safe and properly backed up. Don’t expect a free service to be as safe as something you might pay quite a bit of money for. Also, Google is only responsible for what they have agreed to provide in the service agreement everyone agrees to upon opening a Gmail account. They can’t reasonably be expected to provide anything to you as a user that is outside of that agreement.
With all this said, I think the problem will be solved shortly and won’t be widely exploited. Gmail is safe to use and I use it quite a bit myself. If you can’t live with the terms of a free service and the relatively minor risks associated with it, pay for a more robust service with explicit terms that provide for data backup and recovery.
8 Responses to “Are Gmail Deletions Much Ado About Nothing?”
- 1 Pingback on Jan 2nd, 2007 at 2:16 pm
But, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to back up the gmail data on our local desktop so that we can do recoveries when stuff like this happens?
Hi Mike. I agree. I think we can expect to see some sort of backup feature made available sometime in the near future. It just plain makes sense and I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard to implement something like that.
For now, the best way to back up your Gmail is probably going to be to set up the POP3 feature Gmail offers and download all of your emails to your local machine. I may have to do this myself and write another how to post on it. Thanks for the comment.
A bit of a hype is being created but still i feel it is a bit justified . I beleived my mails were safe in google but after this incident , i am bit scared ..
I already do the POP downloads to Thunderbird on my desktop which is nice for backing up, but it doesn’t do much for restoring the emails if the Gmail account gets accidentally purged.
Yeah, that part sucks, but at least you won’t lose everything. I’ll hope real backups will be a feature offered by Gmail soon…
Madhur, some concern may be warranted here, but it’s still a pretty solid service compared to some of the others. I don’t think I’ve ever lost any mail from any of the big services other than by failing to log into my account often enough, though. Do you or anybody else know if Yahoo or MSN mail offer any kind of backups?
Hi,
I agree with you what you said is right.Compare to other free mail services,GMAIL offers the best.It is faster, more powerful, more space, superior spam protection, optional instant messaging support, as well as many other features such as the ability to automatically forward/delete/apply label to/star emails according to a specific filter.
Gmail is very efficient against spam messages.it provides an impressive file storage size bundled with a small number of limitations. Although I agree that Gmail’s spam filters are quite useful because they send all the unwanted messages in the spam folders, I’m curious what’s the reason for promoting Gmail as a less spam solution after it was made popular for the storage size.surely we can see some sort of backup feature made available sometime in the near future.