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Ask HN: GMail reads and archives mail on its own

7 points by shadchnev ↗ HN
Yesterday evening I had 25 letters in my inbox, 20 of which were unread. When I woke up this morning, I found only 5 unread letters in my inbox, all of which were received during the night. Those 25 letters that were in my inbox in the evening were marked read and archived.

I changed the password and went back to bed wondering what's going on. When I came back in about 2 hours, my inbox was empty and all the unread mail received this night was read and archived.

I'm sure nobody knew my passwords, especially the new one I set this morning. There are no filters set up; I checked it. I'm running Safari on Mac, if that matters.

My bet is that it's a GMail bug. What's your opinion? Did anybody else experience the same?

3 comments

[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 16.5 ms ] thread
igorhvr
At the bottom of the gmail page, you will find text like: "Last account activity: 40 minutes ago at this IP (201.82.153.204)." followed by a "details" link.

Click on the details link, and you will see the last IPs from which Gmail activity took place.

You will also find a "Sign out all other sessions" that might be useful if your account was compromised - even if you changed your password, if someone was logged in already he will not be suddenly logged out - so he might still retain control of your account.

Good luck.

mmelin
The easiest explanation for that behaviour is that you have either forwarding or POP/IMAP enabled and have a client running somewhere you've forgotten about.
shadchnev
You're absolutely right. I set up a mail client to download mails weeks ago and it was downloading them 1 at a time (seems like a server limitation), so it wasn't a problem until today, when it downloaded first unread messages ever. I didn't suspect it because it's been operating for weeks in the background and didn't cause any problems.

Thanks for help!