GMail filter outage dumped piles of Bacn into user’s inboxes

There are two ways companies can clutter up our email inboxes. One is by sending email we never asked for (spam) and the other is sending us items we agreed to at some point, but have little ongoing interest in (bacn).

The junk mail folder is good for dealing with the first, but the second is a bit trickier, as we often have an ongoing relationship with a company, and may want to receive their invoices but not their latest 20% off deal.

Gmail deals with this by filtering promotions into a special Promotions inbox, but recently that went awry, dumping piles of bacn into the main inbox of users.

One of them writes on Google’s support forum:

“I have three mailboxes, primary, social and Promotions. Normally emails go into where they supposed to be. Starting from this evening, suddenly all promotional emails flood into the Primary email! I had nothing to my email I swear! It is so crazy that I receive tons of Promotional emails every hour. Does anyone have the same situation?”

Google acknowledged the issue, writing:

We’re investigating reports of an issue with Gmail. We will provide more information shortly. The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior.

The issue appears to be resolved now, however,

On their support page Google also said:

The problem with Gmail should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better.

Were our readers affected by the issue? Let us know below.

Via Techdows.com