I know. I know. Those of you who are in my gmail con­tacts have been spammed recently by a series of annoy­ing messages.

I’m not sure exactly where the weak link is. Because it’s just peo­ple whom I’ve con­tacted directly from my gmail account via their web inter­face, it could be that some­one man­aged to crack my pass­word there. (I’ve changed it.)

The other pos­si­bil­ity is that some nasty cretin slipped mal­ware onto my iPhone. I have a 3GS that’s jail­bro­ken — and yes, I changed the root pass­word imme­di­ately — but I have no way to know for sure that some of the recent installs to sub­strate stuff was actu­ally entirely safe.

What makes me won­der about the source is sim­ple. My Mail set­tings on the iPhone Settings applet have been hid­den — van­ished — dis­ap­peared. No idea where they went or what made them go away, but it’s inter­est­ing, because that’s where the pass­words are stored.

So I’m in the process now of restor­ing the iPhone to get it back to its orig­i­nal uncracked state, which is going to be a mas­sive pain in the arse to han­dle, and I think it goes with­out say­ing that I won’t be redo­ing the jailbreak.

Most of what I wanted from jail­break­ing will be avail­able with OS 4.0 any­way, so on bal­ance I don’t sup­pose it’s too great a loss.

Meanwhile, those of you who’ve been spammed and linked here to find out WTF was going on, again, I apologize.