Monday mornings are hard at the best of times. Imagine how much tougher they’d be if you were to wake up and discover that all your emails were gone. Well if you’re amongst the 0.8% of GMail users that this mishap affects, that could be exactly what happens to you.
I’ll just give you a second to run off and check your emails are still there.
Back? Ok, good. Apparently this isn’t just an accidental deletion, users inboxes are being reset to how they appeared when the user first signed up for the service, which means no filters, no labels – everything is gone. Users have been turning to the Google Help forums to voice their frustrations, as well as everybody’s favourite moaning megaphone, Twitter.
Google themselves have been quick to act – as you would imagine with such an apparently major disruption to one of their most popular services. Although at first the search giant estimated that around 1.5% of users were affects, they’ve now revised that down to 0.8%, which is between 100,000 and 200,000 people.
They also issued an unhelpfully-vague statement about their repairs attempts –
“Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.”
It is probably some time around now that all those old-school POP3 email users are chuckling sagely at their pristinely backed-up email archives, while all of us cloud-emailers start to sweat and worry for the safety of our archives – and rightly so. But don’t forget a quick visit to GMail’s Settings / Offline tab will give you all the options you need to download your many years of precious Groupon deals. There’s no time like the present!
