Over the past few days, a small subset of users may have been thinking that they were not receiving any new e-mails. No new e-mails were sitting in their inboxes, as all of their new e-mails had been marked as read. This led some users to believe (erroneously) that their accounts were hacked or broken into, and that people were reading their new e-mails.
Google addressed this issue on Wednesday, November 4th in an official statement:
“Last night we pushed a code change in Gmail that negatively affected a small number of IMAP clients, causing unread email to appear as “read.” Only a handful of users experienced this, as most IMAP clients remained unaffected. We’ve since reverted the change and the problem has been resolved.”
Although the issue persisted throughout Wednesday, the glitch had been fixed by Thursday, November 5th, 2009. As Google’s above statement says, the issue only affected a small subset of IMAP users. Not all IMAP users were affected, so the total percentage of users affected by the glitch was small.
Will this cause peoples’ belief in the security and stability of their Gmail accounts to falter? Probably not, since it was only a glitch that affected a minority of user’s accounts, and, contrary to many peoples’ initial fears, it was not a security breach, but was just a technical glitch. The rapidity with which Google resolved the issue is also commendable, as well as the transparency with which it addressed the concerns of the wide and vast Gmail base.
