
Gmail accidentally resetting accounts - there
http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/27/gmail-accidentally-resetting-accounts-years-of-correspondence-v/
======
blntechie
Regardless of how many users affected, it's time to reclaim your emails. Have
heard horror stories of users locked out and not able to restore just because
they don't remember when they created the account or some facts like that.

Good time to download all my emails complete with attachments into a Outlook
.pst file. Would just take 4-5 hours for my 2GB of emails. I would never want
99% of my emails but that does not make a strong point not to backup. Any one
else know a better way? Backupify is one good option but they're also a cloud
provider susceptible to go down any time.

~~~
thought_alarm
Any POP3 client will backup your Gmail account.

I just use Mail.app. My Gmail account is not only backed up but also indexed
in Spotlight and always available for off-line access. You just need to
remember to start up your mail client every once and a while.

~~~
bdhe
Doesn't mail.app make it difficult for you to export your mails to non-
mail.app email clients? Wouldn't Thunderbird or Evolution be better?

~~~
thought_alarm
No, Mail.app imports and exports standard mbox format.

~~~
bdhe
I didn't know that. I presumed wrongly that Mail.app wouldn't allow me to re-
export my stored mail. Now I have the dilemma of choosing to go back to
Mail.app (which I really liked) and lose my Thunderbird customization, or
stick to Thunderbird :-)

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akashs
no worries. you couldn't delete those emails if you tried. no, seriously:
[http://www.law.com/jsp/tal/PubArticleTAL.jsp?id=120243445084...](http://www.law.com/jsp/tal/PubArticleTAL.jsp?id=1202434450846&slreturn=1&hbxlogin=1)

------
pilif
the paid Google apps has an awesome feature that lets you configure it such
that all outgoing mail is sent through a relay of your choice and that all
incoming email should only be accepted by specific relays.

I'm using this to my advantage in that I'm keeping every mail ever sent to or
from our Google apps accounts.

even better: the messages are kept in maildir format that's ready to be served
over IMAP if Google really screws up.

Being able to do this configuration was the condition for me to even consider
Google apps for serious purpose.

~~~
andresmh
Can you explain more about your setup? I didn't know about this and it sounds
very interesting (I was considering using Backupify)

~~~
pilif
I've written a blog post about it. Here's the submission:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2272343>

------
sixtofour
If you don't want to go to the trouble of 3rd parties (all probably excellent)
or running your own imap server and synchronizing to it with larch (probably
excellent) or other synch solutions,

If you use Thunderbird then you have a low barrier to entry and low cognitive
load solution.

[Tools|Edit]Account Settings, then click Synchronization and Storage for you
gmail account (or any other account),

then check Keep messages and click on Advanced. Then check the folders that
you want to synch. The most sensible one for gmail is [Gmail]/All Mail.

Now Tbird will make a copy of all your messages in All Mail.

Caveat: I have found that the copy isn't made until you click on the All Mail
folder in your folder list. Tradeoff between getting something OK working in
two minutes, and the time for whatever other solution.

------
kondro
Because of this I have just implemented an automated backup routine for all my
Gmail accounts.

I used <https://github.com/rgrove/larch> and Dovecot (IMAP only as no delivery
required). Was very easy to setup and seems to work well (still doing initial
sync though).

------
Zakuzaa
I have 16GB data in GMail and a 2mbps connection, how do I backup?

[Added]: I also fear that pulling so much data from Gmail might flag my
account or worst, disable it. I'd really appreciate some help/suggestions.

~~~
trafficlight
Get started and then sit back and wait.

~~~
Zakuzaa
If the connection is lost in-between, would the download resume from that
point?

~~~
jonknee
Yes, because it's not just one file but thousands of individual messages. If
you start downloading by POP or IMAP it will bring down the individual
messages, so if you get stuck in the middle it will resume (after some waiting
time to figure out what's not transfered). It only takes a long time once and
then should be hardly noticeable.

------
sskates
Ouch. This goes against rule number 1 of software: don't lose your user's
data. I'm sure they're smart enough that nothing's permanently lost, but even
the perception that it could happen is bad enough to seriously tarnish their
brand.

~~~
tokenadult
It didn't seem to hurt Reddit at all when Reddit lost my account data early in
its existence. Similarly, MSN did that years ago when I was a charter member,
but that snafu alone didn't seem seriously to hurt MSN's reputation. It's
annoying to me to lose a username, and I don't give repeat business to
services that trash my account data in a way that causes me to be unable to
use my preferred username, but plenty of people sign up for online services
based on the recommendation of a friend (or perhaps an advertisement) without
doing exhaustive research on the company's record of technical competence.

~~~
shantanubala
The main thing is negative press. Google is already big enough that people
don't need to look them up to hear about them. No news outlets really cared if
you lost your very old Reddit username, but news outlets do care if it's
Google losing your username because news about Google makes them money.

------
brown9-2
Where exactly does the 500,000 number come from?

~~~
panarky
An update to the Google App Status page at 5:02 PM PDT says the issue affects
less than 0.08% of Gmail users.

So if the original 500,000-user estimate was based on 0.29% affected, then
we're now looking at approximately 137,000 users.

[http://www.google.com/appsstatus#rm=1&di=1&hl=en](http://www.google.com/appsstatus#rm=1&di=1&hl=en)

------
upinsmoke
172,413,793 gmail users in total? According to wikipedia there are 193.3
million users monthly (as of November 2010).

------
abalashov
And this is why we run our own mail server.

~~~
dschobel
for the 0.000001% of time that gmail is down? your homebrew mail setup can
beat that?

~~~
abalashov
No, for the fact that the 99.99% (you heard it, four 9s!) of time that my mail
server is up, I have full control (and responsibility) for my mail.

------
marcamillion
Is it just me or does Offline Mail break in Chrome on Windows 7 with Priority
Inbox installed ?

For the life of me, I cannot get it working. I have had to resort to Firefox.

I had tried to backup my stuff before, but stopped and this article caused me
to re-evaluate that stance.

Now I tried again and remembered why I didn't finish last time.

Thoughts ?

P.S. Sorry to hijack the thread, but it seemed appropros.

~~~
trotsky
just enable pop or imap and use a traditional client?

~~~
marcamillion
I reverted to doing that.

Thanks.

------
ashutoshm
Using Google Groups To Backup Gmail

[http://www.googletutor.com/using-google-groups-to-backup-
gma...](http://www.googletutor.com/using-google-groups-to-backup-gmail/)

------
haraball
Someone could make an app or script that backups your gmails to e.g. an online
backup service like Backblaze.

------
yanw
Google Appstatus:
[http://www.google.com/appsstatus#rm=1&di=1](http://www.google.com/appsstatus#rm=1&di=1)

~~~
darklajid
Kindof off-topic, but - am I the only one that hates it if there's a link on
the web that redirects to a country specific site and presents itself in a
language that your browser doesn't ask for, the user doesn't want and that's
only 'correct' if you're looking at a f..ing ip address?

I quit most Google services because of this single annoyance (they have
seriously neat hebrew sites as well. If an application wants to use my Google
account and I'm over there, I have to guess which button says yes and which
says no)..

I apologize for the rant. This is just barely on topic here as the worst
possible user experience and I hope services of YC people don't think that
i18n/l10n isn't that easy.

~~~
jonknee
I ran into this the other day when routing through Slicehost VPS via a SOCKS
proxy (I was on a hotel's unsecured WiFi). Google.com kept redirecting to
google.com.hk and was all in Chinese. Nuts. Even more strange was that my IP
was showing from St. Louis, which is pretty far from China.

~~~
daniel02216
google.com/ncr fixes your cookie so that it won't redirect anymore.

