I Get Knocked Down!

But I get up again! (insert slam dancing here)

So, after a very odd week, the Overread Empire returns! I'm still in the dark as to what exactly happened, but here's what I do know:

1. Last Friday (the 1st, right?) afternoon, I suddenly couldn't log in to gmail with my Overead login. The error was something like "the login and password do not match. You typed 'Overread.'" The entire account was just gone. Odd.

2. Then I checked the blogs. Poof-gone. They all showed up as 404 errors. "These are not the blogs you're looking for."

3. After some forum-diving, I discovered that this has happened to several people in the past and they are all unsure of what's causing it. Some are saying that their passwords were compromised and some griefer came in and deleted the accounts, but that seems very improbable to me. Others are saying it was an overactive 'bot that Google uses to shut down spamblogs. That sounds a little more possible, but not much more plausible.

4. An email to googlehelp first returned a not-too-helpful note saying that they could only restore access if I asked within a reasonable about of time. So I reminded them that the original email I sent was sent the same day as the outage.

5. Today's email from Google told me they had restored access. It looks like the blogs survived, but the email from my Overread account is all gone. I'm lucky because I didn't keep anything too vital in that account, but if my main email were zapped like that I'd be in big trouble. One of the reasons that I switched over to gmail (and it sounds like Scrivener is in the same boat) was so that I could have a near-bottomless pit for searchable old emails. So now I'm wandering if I need to start backing up my gmail somewhere else. What a hassle.

I'm really not sure how to react to this. When they were gone, I thought this was going to be a good zen exercise in letting go of my attachments. Maybe it was time for a rebranding of the Overread name. I'm certainly glad that Google got my access back, but my emails....

In any case, I'm back now. Thanks to all of you who sent me notes through flickr and other ways to ask about me. I am very touched by the sentiments.

Edited to add that although there are no real emails in my overread account I have 333 spam emails going back to May 1. Thank goodness those were saved.