Why Free Email May Not Be Such A Good Idea, Especially When You Are Locked Out of Your Account
GMail and Yahoo Mail, the two most popular email destinations on the internet, are truly wonderful products! You get gigabytes of storage and beautiful UI that can be accessed anywhere in the world on any device. The Achilles heel, no real customer service.
Imagine one day you log into GMail and you get an error message that your Username and Password are incorrect and no matter what you do you can’t log in. This is the peril of living in the cloud.
Discussion forums abound with tales of woe from Gmail customers who have found themselves locked out of their account for days or even weeks. They were innocent victims of security measures, which automatically suspend access if someone tries unsuccessfully to log on repeatedly to an account. The customers express frustration that they can’t speak with anyone at Google after filling out the company’s online forms and waiting in vain for Google to restore access to their accounts.
Tom Lynch, a software entrepreneur who lives near Austin, Tex., discovered early last month that he had been locked out of both Gmail accounts he used; he had no idea why. He received boilerplate instructions for recovering his accounts that did not apply to his particular circumstances, which included his failing to maintain a non-Gmail e-mail account as a back-up. He said it took him four weeks, including the use of a business directory and talking with anyone he could find at Google, before he succeeded in having service restored. [via]
This leads to the question do you use free web based email as your primary email service, or do you run your own email server via an third party ISP?
