Time travel explained

Regarding my recent post on emails out of the past, I received an explanation today from the original recipient. I asked, and he granted approval to post the cause. If nothing else, it's a good heads-up on the dangers of using two Gmail accounts at the same time.

I recently decided that I wanted to move all of my e-mail onto the Gmail web e-mail service that is offered by Google. But, I wanted that web account to have all of the e-mail that I had archived over the years -- because as we all know, one of Google's strengths is its searching.

So, I used a program that's out there called "Gmail Loader." How this program works is it took my old e-mail and, every two seconds, sent an individual message from my archive of old mail to my Gmail account. In this way, over a few days' time, this program would move my entire e-mail archive (which included tens of thousands of messages, dating back to 1998) onto Gmail. (Why keep so much old mail? Well, there are a lot of good memories in there.)

However, something really rather unusual and unfortunate happened. I had one browser window open with my Gmail account where the messages were landing; I had another browser window open with a fake Gmail account I had used, which I wanted to delete. Because two Gmail accounts were open in my browser at the same time, the Google website got confused, and when I told it to delete my fake account, it instead deleted my main account. (No, I didn't get confused, Google did. Trust me on this one. For those of you more technically in the know, the login cookies got screwed up because of the two different accounts being open.) That is why, I later learned, Google tells you never to have two different Gmail accounts open at the same time.

Now, some of these old, old messages that had already been sent and were en route to Gmail didn't have anywhere to go, and so the Internet looked at these messages to decide how to handle them. Looking at these messages, the Internet's post office programs noticed that *you* had sent the messages to begin with ... back whenever we originally had these conversations. And because it thought you had sent this message this time around, these programs bounced the message back to you directly as an error message, telling you that the place it was going -- the Gmail account that got deleted -- didn't exist anymore.

So there was, after all, a relatively simple explanation for the emails from the past...