Google Solves Gmail Problem Which Originally Caused Spam

Google has solved a problem with Gmail which earlier resulted in some accounts on the e-mail system to continuously dispatch messages again-and-again.

Covering a span of 5-days, these e-mail messages continued to get delivered into the same account, occasionally several times on a single day. Eventually, the free e-mail facility's disturbed users started complaining on Google's forums. Incidentally, Google mail as well works as the webmail system of GoogleApps' Premier Edition and subscribers using it are supposed to pay for it.

The disturbed users whined that there was a constant re-sending of their e-mails despite getting them erased from Gmail. Consequently, spam alerts emerged to the extent that the users' e-mail addresses got labeled as harmful.

There were also plenty of awkward situations. As per one user, when a certain e-mail message was dispatched to the pager number of the company pertaining to "alert all hands" it initiated the pager alert namely "all hours" for all the employees of that company. Simultaneously, according to another user, the IT department of his organization's e-mail recipients didn't realize that the problem occurred with Google, so they kept on checking their own electronic mail servers.

Google meanwhile, on August 27, 2010, admitted the problem and expressed regret over it. The Internet giant noted that it was going through a problem disturbing about 2.5% of its Gmail users thereby banning them from reaching Gmail, while for some others, their e-mails kept getting re-sent.

However, the 2.5% figure of the user-base of Google is large enough, according to the security researchers. Thus, when Google's user-base numbered 176m during December 2009; it meant that more than 4m users might've been affected.

Nonetheless, it appears that the problem is currently solved. Stated an employee of Google, duplicate e-mails weren't expected to go out any more as also fresh messages dispatched weren't going to be affected with the problem. Mashable published this on August 28, 2010.

Moreover, according to Google's technical support team, while the company is apologetic about the inconvenience caused and since system reliability is most important for it; its members actually constantly strive towards making its schemes better.

Related article: Google Rectifies Gmail flaw in Three Days

» SPAMfighter News - 9/1/2010