Google Mail outage: Did you see that error message last night? Why the 'account does not exist' response is a worry
- Reference: 1608139753
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/12/16/google_mail_outage_responds_with/
- Source link:
The outage lasted from around 21:30 UTC until just before midnight UTC according to the company's [2]status report , and it affected a "significant subset of users."
Email outages are annoying and disruptive; but while email has never been a system that guarantees delivery, most do arrive at their destination eventually unless classified (rightly or wrongly) as spam. If there is an error such as a server offline, it will be automatically retried after an interval. Google unfortunately made this less likely, by responding with the message "550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist." This can cause the sending server to give up immediately, and may also cause the address to be removed from circulation lists.
Email provider ProtonMail informed users attempting to send to Gmail addresses that:
A catastrophic failure at Gmail is causing emails sent to Gmail to permanently fail and bounce back … because Gmail is sending a permanent failure, our mail servers will not automatically retry sending these messages (this is standard practice at all email services for handling permanent failures).
Email (despite its many weaknesses) is used for account verification as well as communications, so this error also caused problems for some third-party services. "Over the past 24 hours, I've had GitHub request that I re-verify my gmail three times (roughly 22 hours ago, 2 hours ago, and now), each time resetting my primary email's status to 'Undeliverable' and 'Unverified'," [3]said a comment on Hacker News.
Another user [4]disputed a transaction on PayPal, assuming that the person with an apparently non-existent Gmail account must be doing something underhand.
"We noticed the issue and mitigated it by transforming the 5xx error into a 4xx error so that messages to Google are re-queues instead of being permfailed. But even with this intervention, the ticket volume was insane,”" said [5]another comment , apparently from the co-founder of email provider MailChannels.
The AWS SES (Simple Email Service) is said to have [6]blocked accounts "because of the high number of bounces."
What can users do if they think that a critical email may have been sent to them but not received? Not much, other than speculatively contacting likely senders to assure them that yes, the account exists, and please resend.
This latest outage follows another more widespread problem two days ago, impacting [7]most Google services and not just Gmail. It is not known whether the two issues are related, but it has been a bad week for Google's users. That said, systems inevitably fail on occasion; but Google should perhaps rethink the circumstances under which its email system reports that a user does not exist. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/16/google_europe_outage/
[2] https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=issue&sid=1&iid=a8b67908fadee664c68c240ff9f529ab
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25436256
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25438048
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25438110
[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25436033
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/14/youtube_down/
[8] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
I agree. A wake up call.
It made me realize just how screwed I'd be if my email stopped working. Since it's currently on a free service provider, that means I have zero recourse. So I spent my morning looking up (DDG) paid email hosting providers. I'll be moving to Protonmail just as soon as my payment clears & they send me the details for my new domain. If it fails after this point, the fact that it's a paid-for service will give me legal recourse should I need to bite them in the arse.
Sorry Gmail, but you've just convinced someone that's been with you since needing an invite to abandon ship. You're convenient, I'll give you that, but you also read my mail, feed me ads, & hoover up everything you can about me. I'm sick of it. Once all my email subscriptions have been verified to go to Proton, I'll be adding Google to my Hosts file. Ciao!
Missed headline opportunity
"Did you see that ludicrous display last night?"
You Get What You Pay For
I have my email through a paid service. It's a minimal cost, my emails aren't read by Google (refer to earlier articles on ElReg to see what I mean) and I don't recall ever suffering an outage in the five odd years I've used them.
Re: You Get What You Pay For
If you look up the MX records of the addresses you write to, you will be astounded how many people allow Google to read and censor their incoming email.
Google has decided that my personal domain is all spam, but doesn't return any error messages, as a result of which my emails have been going into a black hole for months.
Anybody else had this issue? Any ideas what one has to do to persuade Google to accept one's emails.
Re: You Get What You Pay For
I keep telling people to register a domain at Dynadot or Porkbun and either buy email hosting as well or I'll set them up via my reseller account.
In every case there is apathy until the kind of thing described in the article happens or their Yahoo account has 30k spams and they can't find what the want any longer.
Eventually they'll catch up when the losses are the worst possible, meanwhile you can look up how to get your IP off whatever RBL Google uses. Perhaps your hosting provider can accomplishi it if they do it frequently. And if they do it with relative frequency, then find another provider and IP to send from. I've had those on shared hosting, nothing but one misery after another with soiled IP's.
Re: You Get What You Pay For
Google has decided that my personal domain is all spam
Google started rejecting email from my server as SPAM, I found there was a way to contact them and get it taken off their SPAM list. Sorry can't remember where I found it, but I probably just Googled for it. But once found it was an easy process.
"550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist."
"... perhaps rethink the circumstances under which its email system reports that a user does not exist."
hum...
So consider reporting that the _user_ doesn't exist, because the _email_ doesn't exist?
I fail to see the confusion. The message speaks of accounts, the article of users, users have accounts, on Google users are identified entirely by their account as there is no independent username available to them, hence if an account doesn't exist, the user doesn't exist either. Therefore, the message which was sent should only be sent if a user has not set up an account with the specified name or the user's account has been closed. That wasn't the case, so we have a problem.
I question the given timings.
The article says the outage started at 21:30 UTC, I received a number of rejections from known good accounts at 20:40.
MAGA
Make America Gmail Again
TITSUP
Total Inability To Serve Usual Purpose
I moved to Fastmail because I don't trust Google
Google shat on a bunch of my friends, insisting they weren't using their real names, suspending/deleting their accounts and wanting driver's licenses, birth certificates and crap like that to reinstate them.
With an unusual name like mine, I can see Google doing the same to me, so I moved to Fastmail. I sure as hell am not sending them personal documentation. They're not the bank or a government agency. Fuck 'em.
Insecure validation or...
Had this last night and couldn't send anything (but could receive). Apparently message was that I had insecure verification (I normally use K9 on my phone).
This morning, all OK. Anything from Google? Nope. Unless you know where to look.
Gmail refuses to send to my wanadoo.fr or orange.fr addresses. This is a problem for anything US linked (Paypal, eBay) so I am locked out under 2FA
Time to get a 'proper' email address/provider and uae Gmail as my spam catcher...
I got this yesterday.
I have to say that it loosened my bowels a little for a few seconds.
It's amazing how much we depend on these services such that loss like this is so scary.
Perhaps it is a good thing for us to get a reality check like this once in a while.