A man from California, named David S. Peck reportedly received thousands of blank e-mail messages. Peck’s issue is directy linked to a Google's Gmail bug seen on last Friday during its outage where a lot of users could not log in to Gmail.
Peck stated Tech Crunch that "I’ve been getting thousands of no-subject, blank e-mails, 500 of them come every hour, I can’t stop them.”
Google's Ben Treynor, VP Engineering explained the issue in its blog post that "an internal system that generates configurations—essentially, information that tells other systems how to behave—encountered a software bug and generated an incorrect configuration. The incorrect configuration was sent to live services over the next 15 minutes, caused users’ requests for their data to be ignored, and those services, in turn, generated errors. Users began seeing these errors on affected services at 11:02 a.m., and at that time our internal monitoring alerted Google’s Site Reliability Team. Engineers were still debugging 12 minutes later when the same system, having automatically cleared the original error, generated a new correct configuration at 11:14 a.m. and began sending it; errors subsided rapidly starting at this time. By 11:30 a.m. the correct configuration was live everywhere and almost all users’ service was restored."
"The issue has been resolved, and we’re now focused on correcting the bug that caused the outage, as well as putting more checks and monitors in place to ensure that this kind of problem doesn't happen again", he added.
Anyway, this explanation fits in to Gmail service down due to outage issue but what about the glitch for which Peck received so many emails?
What about David S, Peck's issue?
The real scenario was Google mistakenly put his Hotmail address with a link. At the time while searching in Google with the string "Gmail" the users who were already logged in to their Google account used to get a box to compose an e-mail with Peck’s address. As a result Peck got thousands of emails.
Though this bug has been reported to Google and already been fixed now.
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