Gmail was on the verge of collapse

If a genie granted you a wish, would "The ability to access other people's Gmail accounts" be it? Abdulaziz Al-Shalabi from Kuwait wasn't visited by a genie, but he was granted access to Gmail accounts that were not his -- for a considerable period of time at that!

The goof-up began last weekend and only stopped on Wednesday. As it happened, Al-Shalabi was incessantly trying to access his Gmail, and he just wasn't able to. It's not clear whether entering his own username and password -- or random ones -- allowed him access to other Gmail accounts. But as he reported to News.com, he got a peek into the private information of over 30 Gmail users.
The problem apparently occurred only over Al-Shalabi's ISP and with Gmail accounts; it didn't work with Hotmail accounts, for example. Having heard the news, a Gmail user in Sri Lanka reported a similar experience.

Acknowledging the problem, a Google spokesman said the goof-up had occurred in Kuwait because of a server caching problem the ISP was facing. He said Google was in contact with the ISP in question in order to find a solution. It's not known whether other Google sites were also affected by the ISP's problem, and if so, to what extent.

This is certainly a one-off incident, and we're certainly not trying to say you should switch away from Gmail. What's to be learnt is that the system isn't foolproof, and that it's possible for your mail to become accessible to others -- which, we bet, most of you would have thought impossible (unless your password is "abc123" and someone guessed it, in which case you deserve it).

If you're the really paranoid kind, and this bit of news has shaken you more than a bit, you might consider encrypting sensitive mails (such as those in which you call your boss an unfortunate accident of evolution) using a free service such as Hushmail.

Source:techtree.com