Update! I got an email from Gmail Support. They have reset the account, with my name and secondary email address that they had on file. Woohoo! The only problem is that the verification email will go the secondary email address which is my old work address. I need to contact the Network Admin at my old workplace and ask them to reactivate my old email so that I may get my new (temporary) gmail password. It looks like my last (nasty) message to Gmail Support was read and responded to. 🙂 Still… no word on how my account was compromised. Oh well, we will see how it goes.

So, this past weekend someone hijacked my gmail account, and I have sent Google support screenshots and pleas for help to get back my email account, which I have had since June of last year. Here is the latest I got from Google:

Hello,

We have investigated this issue, but because the results were inconclusive, we’re not able to provide further assistance.

Gmail takes the privacy and security of our users very seriously. For this reason, we can’t reveal any further information about this account.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused, and thank you for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

The Gmail Team

Looks like I am S.O.L. Goodbye to all my saved mail from this account. Just imagine if all of a sudden, without warning, your email account just vanished. And your email company said, “sorry, that’s the breaks”. That’s pretty much what Google did to me. Isn’t it ironic that Google says that they take the privacy and security of their users very seriously, and that is the reason they cannot help me? Go figure…

I guess I shouldn’t be too upset. It was a free service, after all. But I won’t be using it any longer. It really has made me sour about Google. The search engine is great, GoogleEarth and GoogleMaps are nice, but their Gmail client is crap.

The Dodgers suck. Last year was their second worse since coming to Los Angeles, and what is crazy is that they had just won the NL West the previous year. It’s amazing to think that the McCourts were handed a team that was a contender, and have totally destroyed it. Not only the team, but the organization. There is dodgerblues.com:

Unless a guy grew up in Echo Park and fantasizes over playing within walking distance from grandma’s house, why would anyone choose to play for the Dodgers (assuming, even, that the Dodgers are willing to spend big money, which they aren’t)? The team is a wreck, the owner is dumb and pompous, and Jeff Kent is surly. Choosing to play for the Dodgers (with what’s been going on lately) would be like walking into a Carrows Restaurant for dinner after seeing people walking out with puke running down their faces.

So, I haven’t been able to login correctly to my gmail account for a couple days. Today I tried my browser on my desktop at home, and got in, I am guessing because of a stored cookie. Anyways, I went to the account settings page and saw that the secondary email address had changed to some random hotmail email address, and the First Name was “Modern”, Last Name “Mode”. All my old email and labels were gone. But some new email was there, including some of my newsgroup subscriptions.

I am not sure what is going on, but I can think of three possiblities:

1) a glitch in the gmail system
2) someone guessed my password
3) Koa somehow removed my account

I am hoping it is #1, but I have a hunch it was #3. Koa has a way of doing the maximum damage with the minimum effort. For instance, in a split second, he can put three fingers on the keyboard and shut down the system. I am not sure what keys he pressed. It looked like a combination of mouse button, C and Space. There must be some child-proof prompt or dialog box, though, when you remove an entire gmail account, right? And if someone found out my password, and was changing settings, I would think that gmail would send an email to my secondary email address notifying me that my account was updated. Well, we will see what happens. Like I mentioned earlier, I am still able to get into that account on one of my machines, so I have taken screenshots of it, and sent those to the gmail support team.

Luckily, I wasn’t using gmail to keep any really important information. I used it mainly as a place where I send my newsgroup emails to so I can read them all in one place. I guess it’s kind of sobering to think that if I was using gmail for important emails or addresses, all that info would now be gone. Gmail is still in “beta”, so what can you expect, I suppose.

At Wells Branch Park.

At T&S Seafood Restaurant.

At Wells Branch Park.

At T&S Seafood Restaurant.

At Wells Branch Park.

At Wells Branch Park.