
Google account suspended: A post mortem - twampss
http://justinlilly.com/blog/2009/aug/07/google-account-suspended-post-mortem/
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jacquesm
Over reliance on third party free services is a real danger.

What's realy scary about this example is that there is no certainty about why
the account was suspended, and also that the people trying to email him would
be notified of this. At a minimum he should have still had read access to his
account and an email from google in his inbox as to why his account status was
changed.

A good warning to everyone else!

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patio11
_Over reliance on third party free services is a real danger._

This seems to imply that if he were paying money for his Google account he
would have either been safe or gotten prompt customer service if it suddenly
stopped working.

That has, sadly, not been my recent experience.

~~~
jacquesm
Well, at least he would have had a right to it. With free services you can
expect to get what you paid for, with a paid service I think the bar is a
little higher.

If google maps stopped working tomorrow and your business depended on it I
really wonder who you would look to to complain.

Email is of course a different matter and I think they handle account
disabling in a very silly way at google. But it's still much better than at
PayPal for instance (and technically speaking you do pay for PayPal).

~~~
nico
There is a paid version of Google Maps, costs $10k/year. It is required if you
develop a private application (ie. not open for everybody).

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jyothi
My account was once temporarily suspended. Reason was probably because I used
to have 2 different gmail id one for personal and one for office adwords,
adsense, analytics, webmaster etc.

Had a very similar experience of realizing how much we rely on google. I
couldn't check my emails, could not IM anyone except for the ones on old ICQ
account. Have no access to a report I was creating on google spreadsheets and
fear of having lost all photographs on picasa, my reader list, calendar and
more.

Google is already a pseudo-desktop/OS on the web. And if that crashes its as
worse as a MS blue screen.

~~~
jacquesm
Open Office is gratis, and USB sticks are cheap.

When you really think about it if you are a single user you do not actually
need google docs.

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tsuraan
Does anybody know what happens to your Android phone when Google suspends your
account? I know my G1 required a google login to actually complete the boot
process the first time, but after that I've never used any google services
other than maps. Would my phone notice if my account were suspended?

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jcl
I believe you can just reset your phone and make a new account to get it
working again. I suppose you might lose contacts, calendar entries, chat logs,
mail, and/or applications.

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revertts
This is largely why I switched my email to a paid provider that I trust plus
local backups; it's simply too important.

Which is not to say that Google doesn't offer excellent services or that
people shouldn't use them, but I think many people put far too much trust in a
single provider without planning for things going wrong. Stories like this
make me slightly apprehensive about all the buzz surrounding Google Wave.

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sahaj
i have two google accounts and one is a mirror of the other (each account
POP3s the other account). i also share all google docs with the other account.
calendar is also shared with each account with full access. other stuff i can
live without.

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jacquesm
It sounds like you still have a single point of failure in there somewhere.

~~~
ovi256
Yep, availability of Google services, but he completely solved the account
problem. This is a very nice solution, altough I fear having to share
everyhing could get labourious.

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tybris
Hmz, reminds me I've been to lazy about making e-mail back-ups. Starting one
right now.

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aerique
I use Google as a search engine, that's it. I really don't like all-in-one
solutions (except Emacs but I can put that on a USB stick) and am actually
surprised how much the person in the article trusts to Google.

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adrinavarro
I also suffered the same, in my case I got suspended two times. First time, I
could recover my account (2 or 3 days later), but then, I had to wait for
about 5 months... and it's such an horrible thing ... (and makes you think
about google and it's situation, or how almost everybody uses at least one
google product).

By the way: I currently run my own email server, but I couldn't resist myself,
so I have a little weird configuration. My email servers stores a copy of
every mail received, then sends it back to my Google Apps account (that can be
done easily with a few tweaks). At least I can enjoy Google talk and the Gmail
interface, without the fear of losing everything if I get suspended one more
time (I hope not).

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xelfer
I run my mail locally and use gmail as the backup.. hopefully losing a Google
account and a disk failure wouldn't happen at the same time.

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rfreytag
Seems to me this is an argument for applications run on a local machine rather
than software-as-a-service (SaaS). At some point you could get dependent on
some SaaS provider who could take your data and services away for some reason
with which you don't agree and with no reasonable recourse.

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qeorge
This was the most disturbing and telling piece of the whole story:

"There was no mention from Google as to why my account was suspended"

Unreal.

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kevindication
So, he never said why his account was suspended.

~~~
anirbas
His most recent comment says that he believes a typo in his fetchmail script
meant it was looking for new mail every minute instead of every five minutes,
and he thinks that's why he was suspended.

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kevindication
Every minute? I'd be surprised if Google even noticed.

