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Don't buy the G1

android007

Newbie
Feb 6, 2009
13
0
My Gmail was hacked by vanigo.com who sent spam to my contacts and
then deleted all my contacts.

Google says it cant help recover the contacts. Thats absurd. Even
Microsoft helped recover contacts of all its users that had the
problem on Hotmail: Lost Contacts & Vanigo - Windows Live Help

I am enraged - had more than 1500 contacts - emails, phones,
addresses. Moreover, I have a G1 phone so all my phone contacts (those
1500+) are gone too since G1 synchs contacts with Gmail.

I used to be a big Google advocate. Now I will boycott all Google
products and start a Google hate group.

And before anybody jumps to claim that I wasn't careful and that I shouldn't blame Google, let me say this: my password is not a dictionary word, is not a name, is 10 characters long, is a combination of upper & lower case letters, digits and special characters, and was categorized as STRONG when I filled it in (the green almost filling the whole password strength bar). I do not use public computers and my computer is secured by CA, McAfee and Norton. My WiFi uses WPA encryption. All things considered, I am reasonably certain that I have taken adequate measures to protect myself (apart from backing up my cloud data).

I had been using gmail exclusively from my G1 phone for a few days when the breach occured - had not been using my laptop for anything at all. Also since for most people affected the breach seems to have happened at or around the same time period, it lends credence to the hypothesis that it's the cloud that was breached.

And don't you think it sucks that Microsoft, the company that we all have always thought of as having the suckiest support, is actually helping its users and Google is not Contacts & Address Book - Windows Live Help

Google's stubborn resistance to restoring the contacts is just annoying. All they need to do is restore the state to that on a particular date. I am sure they have this information at not one but hundreds of servers - gmail, gtalk, g1, backups, caches, etc. What's the point of a backup if you cant restore it?


Also, check out: SOS: All G1, Gmail, Gtalk contacts disappeared. Please help! - Google Mobile Help
 
Didn't you port these contacts from somewhere else ... or were you already a Gmail account holder prior to this horrible situation ?

If these were all gmail contacts prior to your attaining your G1... then this is a good lesson for everyone to export there contacts out of Gmail on a regular basis..

There is an app "MybackUp" that will backup your contacts to the sdcard along with you apps, system settings, call log, bookmarks, sms, mms, home shortcuts, and your AK notepad
 
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I can completely understand where you are coming from here, I had a "spare" gmail account I use for storing important emails. The password for that account, like yours was not a dictionary word and contained a mixture of alphanumerics and other ASCII characters and was about 15 characters in length. Even the answer to the secret question was gibberish to look at.

Someone decided that they liked the look of my account so much, they told google I had taken it from them and my account was removed. I sent mail after mail requesting it was re-instated but the request was refused as I couldnt verify what contacts I emailed using that account (I emailed myself and only myself important information and mails).
 
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I can completely understand where you are coming from here, I had a "spare" gmail account I use for storing important emails. The password for that account, like yours was not a dictionary word and contained a mixture of alphanumerics and other ASCII characters and was about 15 characters in length. Even the answer to the secret question was gibberish to look at.

Someone decided that they liked the look of my account so much, they told google I had taken it from them and my account was removed. I sent mail after mail requesting it was re-instated but the request was refused as I couldnt verify what contacts I emailed using that account (I emailed myself and only myself important information and mails).

Damn that sucks as well ... BACKUP, Backup, Backup ... i know we usually get hit at the worse possible time and haven't had the chance to backup because of our schedules .... Please guys make time to protect your value data ...
 
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@ android007, even though my painful experience with the "lost" account, I still admire Google for what they have done for society. I have faith in their products, and their future but all I have lost is one account, and that was probably down to human error in deciding ownership. I can see a long and glorious future in Google, and I wont let one small incident foul my relationship with them.
 
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@Phases: Deleted contacts don't go to trash, apparently. Or, if they do, then they had been removed from there too. Thanks for thinking about my problem, though.

@Ageless: Sorry to hear about your story. Google sux! :mad: To think that I used to advocate all things Google! :(

But sent/trash emails will have addresses attached, yes? Maybe salvage some..?
 
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Damn that sucks as well ... BACKUP, Backup, Backup ... i know we usually get hit at the worse possible time and haven't had the chance to backup because of our schedules .... Please guys make time to protect your value data ...

Fortunately, it was my "backup" account that was removed. I still have the original mails in my day to day account. I just havent had the time to go through them all to extract the valuable ones
 
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Fortunately, it was my "backup" account that was removed. I still have the original mails in my day to day account. I just havent had the time to go through them all to extract the valuable ones

If you program at all and can get the entire backup data (emails) into one or more large files... you could extract all the text that meets the image of and email ... If not a programmer you can also parse out all the entries in the file that fit the standard email format with Excel ...
 
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But sent/trash emails will have addresses attached, yes? Maybe salvage some..?

Yes, my emails havent been deleted and, theoretically at least, I could perhaps salvage many of the lost email contacts.

Issue is: Phone numbers and addresses. I had typed these in for use on my phone etc. for many of the contacts. Also, since several of my contacts have multiple emails (work, home, school, old home, old work, older work, etc), I had merged these together to create singular contacts...
 
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Jim, I write code on average 12 hours a day, I wish I had both the stamina and inclination to go home and write more code to make my life easier by doing what you just said. I guess 20 years of writing code has finally taken it's toll on me


I can understand that ... but for me it would be worth it ... and I think android007 could benefit by at least getting every email back ... the lose of all the other contact data is a tragedy ... I would be sick ...
 
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I dont understand your anger at Google. Google did not do this to your e-mail account. A bogus web site did this.

I never open e-mail unless I know the person that sent it knows the rules for sending e-mail to me. No one is allowed to send me forwarded e-mail. If they do I delete it without opening. If they want me to read an e-mail that was sent to them, they need to copy and paste the info into a new e-mail. If they continue to forward e-mail they go on my spam list untill they stop. Also I delete e-mails that have wierd subjects or anything else that doesnt look right.

I use my work computer, laptop and G1 to send and recieve e-mail through Google. So I am very carefull with what I open. I have an 8 (random numbers) digit password and have chnged it many times.

Give Google a break on this one. It isnt all thier fault.
 
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You probably got XSS.. i got owned the same way.. it doesnt matter how careful you are it only takes a matter of seconds for a hacker to find a victim Xss into his machine and load a keylogger to do his deeds..

same thing happened to me prior to owning a G1 (should be here soon)

matter of fact i had to learn the hard way not to open emails (EVEN ONES from people i know) when I'm not expecting them

if you're not expecting to get an email from your cousin for an amazing DEAL dont open it

how XSS hacks works is the hacker needs HTML or javascript to execute there program to screw you over... and I received an email from vanigo and INSTANTLY knew something was up so i deleted the email...contacts emails everything is still here and safe..
 
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@kabbie_mcfeely
and
@FP1988

The reason for my anger at Google is simple: while the villain in this case is some Chinese hacker/website, everybody knows they are bad; but I am angry at Google because it was Google that gained my trust over the years and is now letting me down. And it doesn't help when even a company like Microsoft is doing much more for affected users than Google is.

Also, regarding your presumption that I left myself open to attacks, I would request you to please re-read my email. I don't know what else I could have done to protect myself. Also, considering I was only using my G1, not my computer, when this happened, I'd say it's very unlikely to be a vulnerability at my end.

@justjimjpc

Yes, it is a good idea to backup. But here's my dilemma: I recently (when I moved to Android from WM) extracted my SMSs into an XML file, and since then have been trying to find an app that would help import these SMSs into the G1. Sure there are several SMS backup apps out there, but from what I have been able to find, these apps only export from G1 - they are not able to restore even the backups that they themselves have saved. So my question is, what is the point of backing up if you can't retrieve it?

@everyone

Since I still have emails in the gmail mailbox, is there any way I could exctract all email addresses from emails to my All Contacts and then start the categorization, consolidation, merging, detailing process?



 
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@kabbie_mcfeely
....
@justjimjpc

Yes, it is a good idea to backup. But here's my dilemma: I recently (when I moved to Android from WM) extracted my SMSs into an XML file, and since then have been trying to find an app that would help import these SMSs into the G1. Sure there are several SMS backup apps out there, but from what I have been able to find, these apps only export from G1 - they are not able to restore even the backups that they themselves have saved. So my question is, what is the point of backing up if you can't retrieve it?


All I can say in my case, is if i can get the data out in a csv file I know I can use Excel to parse the data into any order I need to to make it import properly. I can filter/ and also delete contacts i no longer need, if lets say the orginal contacts had the ability to store 3 phone numbers or 3 address, etc .. and the new system I am importing into has less or none at all ... I can delete/not include those fields from the new csv file I will create and be using to load my contacts into the new device ...

If the new device has a field that my old one does not then I can add that field.

The first thing I would do with the new device would be to create a new contact and complete every field item that is possible and then export that to the csv file ... I then know all the fields for that device and their given order...

Then do the same thing for the old system ...

I then know which fields from both system are in common ... In the new excel file just be sure to keep the fields in order ... you can cut and paste the fields from the old system's csv imported into excel and paste that data into the corresponding column/field into your new table of contacts... when all of those are done ... then you can output that table to a new csv file that will be in the native format/order of the new device... and you should be golden from there...


.
@kabbie_mcfeely
....

@everyone

Since I still have emails in the gmail mailbox, is there any way I could exctract all email addresses from emails to my All Contacts and then start the categorization, consolidation, merging, detailing process?




Yes you can do this ... but it is a bit of work ... I think I suggested before that if you collect those emails into a large txt file... depending on the amount you may have to break the text file up into multiple files...

The you can open the text file with excel and my default you should get the text falling into rows ... find the first column that doesnt have any import text data in it. This is where you can start writing your formula to extract the emails...

Depending on your version of excel will determine what function you use for doing your "FINDS" .

i.e. =SEARCHB("@",a1) this will give you the character position of the "@" in the text data. to find the total length of the test line of data you would use : =len(a1) ... then i would write a nested "if" statements to locate the first space that appears after the postion you found the "@" character.

Then there are several approaches to find the beginning/first character of the email ...

If you are interested ... you could email a small sample of your text file and I could build the excel formulas for you and then you can just copy them into the proper columns and replicate that row of formulas down all the rows that contain data ..

once all the calculations are done and the result column contains your emails ... you would do a copy of that column ... then in a fresh column do a 'special paste' of just values ... this column would then contain your extracted emails in txt format ... this could also be done with a simple macro .. to do the copy and paste..

Let me know if I can help you with this task ... ???

BTW: I have built the basic excel sheet for extraction ... using Excel 2003 on and XP... I have not copied all the formulas thru all the rows (65536) yet
and have done initial testing on a single email that was about six replies deep on its thread... so far so good /// had to do some manual editing of source data because of copy/paste errors from between the email and into a notepad file... might be less if I had used wordpad. ??? but the errors show up very obvious due to the way the sheet is designed ... so editing the bad text is easy to do.





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