Recently, Google has done a mistake by disabling the Gmail accounts of some users due to an apparently overzealous attempt by the company to combat spammers. People started reporting in the official Gmail Help Discussion forum that Google had locked them out of their accounts.

A Google staffer, who patrols the forum and posts messages, has acknowledged the existence of a problem at mid-afternoon Thursday. This person wrote, “I understand that some of you have had a frustrating experience with your accounts being inappropriately disabled. Our team is aware of the problem, and our engineers are continuing to investigate.” Then, several hours later, the Google staffer declared that the problem has fixed.

According to the Google staffer, people whose accounts were disabled by mistake should have regained access to them already and no data should have been lost. In addition, Courtney Hohne, Google spokesperson, via email, has confirmed that Gmail would not accept messages sent to those accounts while they were disabled, returning a “bounce-back” notice to senders. Gmail will not automatically attempt to redeliver those rejected incoming messages. Moreover, she said that the company’s goal has always been to keep Gmail free of people who abuse the service and to keep Gmail inboxes free of spam. Google has been targeting a large network of spammers to keep them out of the Gmail system and accidentally disabled access to some other accounts.

Hohne said that the mistakenly disabled accounts affected “a small fraction,” well below 1 percent of the tens of millions of Gmail users. In addition, this discussion thread is one of the longest in recent months. It is full of frantic pleas for help from affected people who use Gmail as their primary email service for personal or work communications.