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How to lock a Gmail account for more than 5 days

8 points by draxofavalon ↗ HN
This happend to me, its pretty easy to lock any gmail account for more than 5 days (and counting...). This is what I did:

- Search for some useless mails, for example do a search of @somedomain.com [I got 100k results] - Select ALL those mails and send them to trash - Go to your trash folder and try to empty that folder - voila! you dont have access to your mail account anymore!

You will get a Temporary Error (500) Numeric Code: 93

If someone sends a mail to you it will bounce!

It looks like gmail server is still trying to delete those 100k emails from my trash folder.

(if someone at G reads this my email is ericgil (at) gmail)

10 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 29.6 ms ] thread
mark-r
Deleting a ton of emails is one sign of a hacked account, and Google has been trying to add safeguards lately. They're probably waiting for you to contact them, at which point you'll have to jump through hoops to prove you're the rightful owner.
dlikhten
heh. There goes my hopes of cleaning out my wife's 200k+ unread email account.
draxofavalon
dlikhten try! lets see if this works for everyone :)
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
its_so_on
how do you have a hundred thousand emails from any domain??
draxofavalon
I have some blogs and every registration sends me a email.
tawm04
I had this happen at work. I admin a Google Apps domain and someone tried to delete several hundred thousand emails at once. We ended up having to do some account name switcharoos and he lost everything that was in the old account because Google was moving too slow. Best of luck to you.
draxofavalon
Today I had my account back!

Tip: go search in G+ some gmail staff and annoy them, thats how I got my account back.

I still cant get rid of lots of mails I need to delete and I dont want to delete them by 100 a time.

eliot_sykes
Some help can be found on the 2nd page of the Gmail Help Forum post that draxofavalon posted:

Numeric Code 93 means google's mail firewall has blocked your ip address, normally due to trying to delete trash or bin labels from a 3rd party mail client. So most of you who have a dynamic ip can just reboot your router to reissue a new ip address and you'll be back into you account. If you are unfortunate enough to have a static ip you'll need to access your account from a friends computer or mobile phone.