Hacker Remix

Ask HN: Did anyone else see an avalanche of old email appear in Gmail?

4 points by DamnInteresting 3 days ago | 2 comments

This past Wednesday something strange happened to my main email address, which is a POP3 mailbox that is pulled into Gmail. Something came unstuck, and a bit over 10,000 messages slowly piled into my Gmail inbox throughout the day, with dates from 2023 and 2024.

All but a handful of these were spam, and Gmail wasn’t marking them as such, so I had to manually flag thousands of messages. But there were a few real emails in there, including some important replies I was seeing for the first time.

I was telling my friend about it at lunch today, and they said something very similar happened to them; thousands of old messages came piling into their Gmail inbox a few days ago, most of it spam.

The fact that such an odd thing also happened to someone I know at around the same time makes me wonder if it might be a more widespread issue. Did anyone else see anything similar in recent days?

firefax 53 minutes ago

I haven't been able to access my gmail in years -- iOS apparently doesn't back up TOTP generators when you back up your iphone, and the so called "recovery codes" did not work. (I even went into an encrypted volume to check I hadn't made a transcription error since I had transcribed the codes for several sites into a notebook I kept ina safe)

No other service has failed in this way. (A few others, I used recovery codes to regain access with zero issue)

Since I had ported my childhood cell # into google voice, I couldn't access SMS MFA, and thus was locked out.

It's no surprise you're having an odd bug, but at least you have access to your email -- I'd encourage you to export it ASAP and move to a provider who can manage their infrastructure properly.

wingerlang 2 days ago

POP mails stopped being imported from my hotmail since some time. I noticed it recently but could not make it work again. Switching to the new (to me, anyway) "gamilify" option from within Gmail settings - I experienced a similar avalanche. Probably two-three weeks ago, but these emails were from decades ago until recent. They did not go to junk, but they were labelled as "email/x/x/junk".