When Jeneane Sessum logged into her Gmail account on the afternoon of 27 October, she was greeted with a horrifying sight: an empty inbox.
A Gmail user since 2004, Sessum, a social media consultant and writer in Atlanta, had thousands of messages there, enough to use up almost 30% of her allotted storage space.
Since Gmail is her primary work and personal email service, Sessum lost many important messages, including some she needed at that moment for a project.
Days earlier in Chicago, Jessica Squazzo, a writer and editor, accessed Gmail and stared at her computer screen in disbelief: all messages from 2007 had disappeared from her inbox.
Sessum and Squazzo are just two of a small but steady stream of Gmail users who regularly report losing some, many, or all of their messages without a clue as to why.
Asked to comment about multiple lost-message reports in 11 different threads created in September and October in the Gmail Help forum, a Google spokesman declined to address any of the specific situations, citing privacy reasons.
However, he did emphasise that, as far as Google is concerned, “most issues like this are a result of phishing attacks or compromised passwords – or sometimes simply messages mistakenly deleted or marked as spam – not a data corruption issue”.
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