Want to backup your Gmail?
Volker draws my attention to this sorry little tale of a wolf in sheep's clothing.It seems that, for the very reasonable price of $29.95, you can purchase a piece of software named g-archiver, which is a solution to a problem you may not even have known you had - how to back up Gmail.
There are just one or two issues with this.
- You can back your Gmail up for free using POP from your favourite email client.
"Not good enough," I hear you say, "I want to back up my Gmail labels (1) too."
OK then. Use IMAP, also for free.
- In any case, buying software to manage a service flies in the face of the software-as-a-service concept.
- Oh, and there's that other tiny little problem - g-archiver is coded to email your Gmail username and password to another email account controlled (2) by the software's author.
This is rather ugly, but the actions of the chap who discovered it are nearly as bad.
I decided to go ahead and blast every email [containing the Gmail usernames and passwords of people who had used g-archiver] to the deleted folder and then empty it. I may have accidentally changed the password and security question to something I don't remember as well, whoops, my bad. I also contacted google to erase this account as I didn't see a way to delete it myself.
Yes, lock the bad guy out. Yes, tell Google. But don't delete the evidence.
Interestingly McAfee's SiteAdvisor service, which runs as a browser addin and which I have had installed here for quite some time, flags the g-archive site (3) as green.
We tested this site and didn't find any significant problems...
... In our tests, we found downloads on this site were free of adware, spyware, and other potentially unwanted programs.
Well, those tests are automated and are only looking for code which exhibits certain characteristics, such as attempting to exploit known vulnerabilities or make changes to certain registry keys, so this is understandable even if it does somewhat devalue the Siteadvisor service. One user has left a comment about the problem, but few users would ever click through to a site's report page - they only want to see that green button in the status bar.
- Gmail labels are not exactly like folders though they are treated as such for IMAP. They are more like categories in the Lotus Notes sense, in that an individual document may have many labels.
- The email account in question is no longer under the control of the bad guy.
- Deliberately not linked to from here.
1. Ben Rose10/03/2008 11:50:04
Kind of on topic...I read this for the first time today.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/04/facebook_friend_request_jail-time/
Another good example of not giving a 3rd party access to your private information 
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