Ask HN: Did anyone else see an avalanche of old email appear in Gmail?

This past Wednesday something strange happened to my main email address, which is a POP3 mailbox that is pulled into Gmail. Something came unstuck, and a bit over 10,000 messages slowly piled into my Gmail inbox throughout the day, with dates from 2023 and 2024.

All but a handful of these were spam, and Gmail wasn’t marking them as such, so I had to manually flag thousands of messages. But there were a few real emails in there, including some important replies I was seeing for the first time.

I was telling my friend about it at lunch today, and they said something very similar happened to them; thousands of old messages came piling into their Gmail inbox a few days ago, most of it spam.

The fact that such an odd thing also happened to someone I know at around the same time makes me wonder if it might be a more widespread issue. Did anyone else see anything similar in recent days?

3 points | by DamnInteresting 16 hours ago

1 comments

  • wingerlang 5 hours ago
    POP mails stopped being imported from my hotmail since some time. I noticed it recently but could not make it work again. Switching to the new (to me, anyway) "gamilify" option from within Gmail settings - I experienced a similar avalanche. Probably two-three weeks ago, but these emails were from decades ago until recent. They did not go to junk, but they were labelled as "email/x/x/junk".