Google says it's working to restore lost messages

NEW YORK: Google has restored e-mail service to some of the users who found all of their old messages deleted on Sunday.

Google Inc. first posted a notice about the problem Sunday afternoon on a site where it informs users of service problems on applications such as e-mail. The company says the problem affects less than 0.08 per cent of Gmail users, or eight of every 10,000. That's down with its earlier estimate that 0.29 per cent, or 29 of every 10,000.

Google did not say how many users this translates to, only that its Gmail service has ``hundreds of millions'' of users around the world. That would mean that tens of thousands - 80,000 out of every 100 million - users were affected.

The company says it expects to resolve the problem for all users in ``the near future'' but it did not give an exact time.