All but a handful of these were spam, and Gmail wasn’t marking them as such, so I had to manually flag thousands of messages. But there were a few real emails in there, including some important replies I was seeing for the first time.

I was telling my friend about it at lunch today, and they said something very similar happened to them; thousands of old messages came piling into their Gmail inbox a few days ago, most of it spam.

The fact that such an odd thing also happened to someone I know at around the same time makes me wonder if it might be a more widespread issue. Did anyone else see anything similar in recent days?