Gmail Accidentally Resets 150,000 Accounts 401
tsj5j writes "Many users have reported loss of their Gmail accounts, as they signed in to find their email accounts reset — losing years of email history. This appears to be a result of a bug which treats existing owners as new users. For those affected, Google is currently trying to resolve the problem. For the rest of us, perhaps this is a timely reminder to backup our data and be less trusting of the cloud."
Seems like a good place to suggest backup solution (Score:5, Informative)
A stand-alone application seems the safest way to go. Personally, I use MailStore [mailstore.com] (free home edition) to ensure a local backup of my Gmail mails.
I suspect offline access via Gears wouldn't help much in this case. It's supposed to stay in sync so I guess logging into an empty account would sync the local gears data into oblivion as well. The same would presumably be true of a local IMAP client (though that could at least be recovered from a backup and then opened in offline mode).
Gmail-Backup (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not so much of a story, really (Score:4, Informative)
They do that often. We get tons of people complaining that the cloud isn't reliable (mylself included), some people arguing that the cloud is more reliable than most PC out there, some people arguing you should have a backup, and some people arguing that Hotmail is crap and asking if somebody still uses it.
Well, the only difference I can see is that there is nobody arguing that gmail is crap and asking if somebody still uses it.