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?
I use Gmail as a proxy to my real email addresses. I use Thunderbird, and it’s much easier to condense it all to one email address. Also, my ISP (school) does not have an SMTP server so I use google’s
I’ve been using Gmail as my primary. I even go so far as to feed all of my other email accounts through a single Gmail account. My "hosted" email is simply redirect to Gmail (maybe I should rethink things and keep a copy on my personal server rather than setting up just a redirect). The recent story about getting locked out of Gmail has me rethinking things again. The trade-off of moving away from Gmail is having to deal with spam. I remember trying to use my server IMAP rather than Gmail and I would regularly receive 200+ spam emails per day in my inbox. With Gmail, I’m lucky if 3-5 get through. Decisions decisions….
Honestly, this is one of those situations where if it becomes large enough of an issue, enough people will complain and Google (or whoever) will adjust their practices. Google relies on people using their service, so if people bail, it will make them change.
Derek, just redirect all the mail from gmail to your server and they will filter the spam for you.
It’s always good to build redundancy into any system. You can feed Gmail to a mail-client and save all the messages there. Or you can set it up to forward it elsewhere. I don’t think your scenario will ever happen, but I agree that it’s better to be a little paranoid than too complacent.
i host my email with google apps, and go through imap. if i cant log in, i have backups and would change the dns records and have my email back.
Whoa, I didn’t hear about this. Should I ever become locked out of my GMail account, I at least have an EMail account included with my website. I have unlimited EMail address signup capability [no idea why].
Well, Gmail is my backup. I have it get my email from my other accounts, then i download those (yay pop email) to my computer. By the time I read my email, it has been stored in three places (original account, Gmail, PC)
That’s impressive backup man. BTW, we have the same first name, lol.
I dunno. I use a Zimbra provider… Zimbra seems to fit my life perfectly! Then I use my hosts email as a backup.
Seriously ask yourself why the major corpeates dont use google app’s because its shown itself to be just as unreliable as a hosted system and NO CONTROL whatsoever they control the system you are simply making use of it which is fine if you agree but that moment will come when you dont for whatever reason agree its too late
if you care about your data you keep it safe within your control
how you do that is up to you
regards
John Jones
http://www.johnjones.me.uk
deadsunrise, duh. Why didn’t I just think of doing that? Now I have no more excuses. I guess I’ll go back to eating up some of my hosting bandwidth for personal email.
I think we are ALL missing the point.
HEY GOOGLE, PLEASE SEND ALL OF US FORMS TO FILL OUT IN CASE OF HIJACK.
I never got that original # on ANY official gmail accounts.
Thanks.
I haven’t been able to access my gmail (natali.ardianto@) for over a month now! It says:
Sorry… account maintenance underway
We’re currently performing maintenance on your account. You won’t be able to log in while maintenance is underway, but your account data and messages are safe. Unfortunately, we can’t predict exactly how long this will take.
If this maintenance lasts more than 24 hours, please contact us at gmail-maintenance@google.com.
When I send an email to that gmail-maintenance account, all I have is an autoresponse. Really sucks since I use that account for all my mailing lists and backups.