Gmail accounts go disabled

NEW DELHI: The Internet giant Google Inc reportedly disabled a few Gmail accounts in an overzealous to combat spammers.

The Google staffer, who monitors the forum and posts messages on Gmail Help forum on behalf of the company, acknowledged the existence of a problem on saying “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. Thanks for bringing this to our attention.”

Several hours later, the employee writing under the name ‘Gmail Guide’ declared that things were back to normal and wrote, “Our efforts to prevent breaches of our Terms of Use (policy) caused a number of users to be incorrectly identified.” This most meant as spammers or other abusive users.

In a subsequent posting, the employee provided more details about the situation, saying that it was the result of an effort by Google to bar such users from the Gmail service. Users whose accounts were disabled by mistake should have regained access to them by that point, without losing any of their account data, Gmail Guide wrote.

The problem was first reported on Wednesday when users of the e-mail service began reporting on the forum that they couldn't access their accounts.