Google has issued an urgent warning to millions of Gmail users after it identified a weird bug that attaches a sender warning to every email received, Forbes reports. The company first noticed the bug last Thursday and has since been working to find a fix.
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Bug attack
If you were one of the millions of users affected by this bug, you may have noticed that all your emails came with a security warning usually reserved for suspicious emails. By Friday, Gmail owner, Google confirmed that the bug had spread to more ‘Gmail consumers and Enterprise customers’ than feared. The warning attached to the emails read:
Do you want to continue receiving messages from this sender? Please give us feedback about this message. We won't ask you about this sender again, although you can always unsubscribe or mark it as spam in future.
This message is only sent out to receivers when the server is suspicious of an email. It is to flag those emails as potential security risk, so users open them with caution, or they opt to send them to spam. This is why many users were concerned to see this warning attached to every email they received, even those that are repeat senders.
Update
Google had assured staff were working to fix the bug and that an update would be provided at the weekend. However, it was only yesterday that the company issued the expected update announcing the problem had been fixed.
The Gmail issue has been resolved. We apologize for any inconvenience. Thank you for your understanding and support.
This means you can go about using your Gmail as usual. But, you shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss those warnings in the future as they could be protecting you from hackers and scammers.
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