Users of Google Inc.'s free e-mail service are reporting that their e-mails, archives and even their accounts are being irretrievably deleted.

Starting as early as Dec. 17, some subscribers of the internet search giant's Gmail offering have found that their messages and accounts were wiped out, according to some accounts.

Frustrated Gmail users have been posting messages to online discussion forums — including the company's own Google Groups — complaining of the problem and demanding a resolution.

"Found my account clean, nothing in inbox, contacts, sent mail," a person using the moniker Ps101 wrote in a Google Groups discussion thread. "How can all this information residing in different folders disappear?"

The post opened a flood of similar notes.

"We lost all our messages — all of them, get it? I lost over a thousand — from every single folder," a Gmail user calling himself Pronk wrote in a discussion thread on Google Groups on Dec. 21.

Pronk noted that prior to the crash, he had repeatedly received a notification from his web browser that more than 100 scripts, or web-based programs, were running slowly. Scripts are sometimes used by malicious attackers to spread viruses. Several of the people who posted messages, including Pronk, said they used the Firefox 2 web browser.

Google launched its free, web-based e-mail service on April 1, 2004, offering users a gigabyte of storage — the equivalent of 500,000 pages of text — 250 times more storage than most free e-mail services were offering.

"If a Google user has a problem with e-mail, well, so do we," Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder and president of technology said in a written statement at the time.

But answers to the problems of Gmail users with vanishing accounts and data have been slow in coming, they say.

"From now on I will be completely revising how I save messages, contacts, etc.," a user going by the name PlanetPhillip wrote on Dec. 24.

He posted another message on Thursday inquiring whether there was any news about the problem. "I'm still waiting to be contacted by Google," he wrote.

In a subsequent post to the discussion on Thursday, Pronk published an excerpt from an e-mail he said he had received from Google.

"Our engineering team has been working to resolve the issue with your account that we detected in our system," he quoted Google as saying. "An isolated problem caused the loss of all the data in your account before December 18. Our engineers worked long nights to try to locate any recoverable information, but … they have finally had to accept that for your account we could not recover the data."

Spokespeople for Google could not be immediately reached for comment.