Blig Blogging

So You Think Gmail’s The BEST

This happened to me a little while back. I remember that it was on the 14th day of 7th moon of the Chinese Lunar calendar, which makes it the Ghost Festival, which means on 14th August, 2008. I remember the date exactly because I sent a text to my friend and said, “GOT GHOST!”

That morning, I received an email from a guy from Australia. Someone I do not know. Normally, I would have trashed the email but you know, spam mail hardly get sent to our Gmail inbox. So, curiously, I opened the email and surprisingly, it was sent to someone with the same name as myself.

I checked the email address of the recipient and while my own email is surnamename@gmail.com, this email was intended for the email surname.name@gmail.com. I was alarmed to say the least. I emailed the sender and asked him if the email was for someone with the same name as I and if her email address was surname.name@gmail.com and he confirmed it.

Although I am not annoyed to be sent an unsolicited email, since I do get a slew of spam mail every day, the fact is that the email has been sent to the wrong person. Can you imagine if that email contained sensitive or personal information and it landed in the wrong mailbox?

I went searching for a way to report this glitch to Gmail and spent the better part of the morning looking for the stupid form to do so. I expressed my concern that sensitive, or perhaps financial information, may have been leaked due to this glitch. Sure, we know not to send such information via email but when we are the recipient, we have no way to stop other people from sending whatever messages to us, right?

So how long has it been since this matter happened? Three weeks or so. Gmail did not even bother to acknowledge my message, let alone assure me that this is an isolated case and that they are going to ensure that it will never happen again. You know, Gmail has been in service since late 2003 or early 2004. After so many years, they are still in Beta.

Of course, this is no big loss to me, personally, but I do have a couple of Gmail accounts for different purposes and I know that Gmail is the default email service for many web users. With this post, I hope to serve a warning to all email users, not just Gmail, to be careful of what is being transmitted. You’ll never know whose hand it will land in.

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Tags: Gmail, Gmail glitch

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