GMail Bug That Turned Some Users Into Spammers Fixed
Written by Sue Walsh on August 30, 2010
Google announced that it has fixed a bug that caused a small percentage of GMail accounts to send the same email messages over and over again. The unending barrage of messages caused some of the affected accounts to be blacklisted by services such as SORBS.net and Backscatterer.org and left users wondering if their computers had been infected with some kind of malware or hacked.
“The problem with Google Mail should be resolved,” Google’s tech support staff wrote. “We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.”
Some affected users who use GMail for business purposes were embarrassed and left having to explain to clients and colleagues who were no doubt annoyed by the flood of duplicate messages. Google has not provided any details about the bug or what might have caused it, and it’s not known if they provided assistance in getting blacklisted users off those lists.
It’s estimated that about 2.5% of GMail’s roughly 160 million users (as reported by the Wall Street Journal) were affected. That may not sound like much, but it equals about 4 million users whose accounts were turned into mail bombing machines by the bug. That’s a lot of email.
Google probably wishes the timing had been better as the bug hit in the same week they had called a press conference to announce that Google Voice and GMail have been integrated.
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I’ve always been particularly happy with Google’s mailing service, as well as their efforts to effectively stamp out spam. The system is far from perfect of course, since (a good number of times) the service’s ability to discern spam from legitimate e-mails is sometimes a concern.
Though we don’t normally support the use of browser based e-mails outside of personal use, our company always been behind G-mail as a preference. It’s ironic, now, that G-mail would drop the ball by becoming (unintentional) spammers themselves.
@Freddie As long as Gmail continuously dumps important correspondences into my spam box, I’ll consider G-mail to be a long way from “perfect”. We avoid the use of browser-based e-mails as much as we can in the office. It’s too hard to monitor user activity with out-of-office systems such as G-mail. I’m still curious what caused the glitch in Google’s systems though. Heads must roll if it’s affecting over 4 million of your clients.
I’m surprised this story isn’t getting more press around the web. This is a pretty big screw up, especially for a company as widely recognized as Google. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems that G-mail has been the staple for web based e-mails over the past half-decade or so. I can only imagine the kind of embarrassment (and hate mail) Google had to endure when their system went haywire. Does anyone here know of anyone who suffered from the problem?