Gmail Combats Spammers, Blocks Users

An overzealous antispam measure mistakenly blocked legitimate users from their accounts


Antispam Measure Blocks GMail users
As an attempt to combat spammers, Google recently mistakenly disabled Gmail accounts of some users. Midweek, people started reporting in the official Gmail Help Discussion forum, that Google had locked them out of their accounts.

A Google staffer who oversees the forum and posts messages on behalf of Google acknowledged the existence of a problem at midafternoon Thursday.

"I understand that some of you have had a frustrating experience with your accounts being inappropriately disabled. Our team is aware of the problem, and our engineers are continuing to investigate," this person, identified as Google Guide, wrote.

Several hours later, the Google staffer declared the problem fixed "Our efforts to prevent breaches of our Terms of Use caused a number of users to be incorrectly identified," the staffer wrote.

The Google Guide also detailed some information about the situation in a subsequent post to the forum. The staffer said that it was the result of an effort to rid users who abuse the mail service, such as spamming.

Accounts which were disabled by mistake should have regained access to their mail with no data lost, said the staffer.

However, spokesperson Courtney Hohne said that Gmail would not reject any incoming messages to those disabled account, returning a "bounce-back" notice to senders, and will not automatically attempt to redeliver those rejected messages.

"Our goal has always been to keep Gmail free of people who abuse the service and to keep Gmail inboxes free of spam. We've been targeting a large network of spammers to keep them out of the Gmail system and accidentally disabled access to some other accounts," she wrote. Hohne said the mistakenly disabled accounts affected "a small fraction," well below 1 percent of the tens of millions of Gmail users.

Late Friday morning, some people are still complaining that their accounts were still locked.

The discussion thread is one of the longest in recent months, and is full of frantic pleas for help from affected people who use Gmail as their primary e-mail service for personal or work communications.

Along with disabled Gmail accounts, users were also complaining in the past month about a problem with the mail service. The new version of Gmail, dubbed Gmail 2.0, became extremely slow, often fails to load pages, and even crashes their browsers, users complained.

Gmail, which features an ungraded contacts manager and is designed to be faster and more stabled, is based on what the company calls "a major structural code change".

One of several threads devoted to this issue in the Gmail Help Discussion forum continues to grow, with nearly 300 messages at this time.