It’s official now. Actually it has been for some time, I just didn’t know about it. A large number of genuine Gmail accounts being used without any abuse are being disabled. Some accounts seem to be up again, but only some. Mine isn’t either, although it’s much more than 24 hours (the expected response time). And, yes, I had filled the required contact form quite early.
As the Economic Times (India) article says, “The Internet giant Google Inc reportedly disabled a few Gmail accounts in an overzealous [attempt?] to combat spammers”. Except that ‘few’ here refers to a very large number, judging from the lists of complaints I have seen while searching with the query ‘gmail account disabled’.
It is being suggested that only the new accounts are affected by this, but my account is not really a new one. If I am not mistaken, it’s more than an year old. That’s old enough for Gmail.
The funny thing is that the spate of spam mails (I was the recipient, not the sender, in case someone is mistaken) after which my account was disabled asked the recipients to furnish information about their Gmail accounts and threatened that if such information was not sent within the specified period, the account will be disabled. And the account was actually disabled, even before that deadline. Most of the people who saw that mail (it was sent multiple times to my account and many people commented about it) immediately thought that it was another of those fake mails which are a regular feature of the email world. But given this funny situation, I can’t help wondering whether the mail was actually an official Google mail. Of course, it was not, but an absurd situation anyway.
I am still waiting for my account to be enabled again. And I hope the primary account is not disabled in the ‘overzealous attempt to combat spammers’. As I said earlier, I oppose spam but I don’t support anti-spam fanaticism.
I had once mentioned that my homepage had suddenly disappeared from the Google index. It has since come back on the index. I hope Google doesn’t become comparable with the official censors (of anything anywhere).
What if WordPress suddenly, ‘with or without any notice’ (as the Gmail Terms of Use say) disables my blog? Sounds sinister and utterly unethical to me. Even if I am using the free version of WordPress. Google may be providing the email service for free, but they are putting ads on the side, aren’t they? That’s the Internet business model. It’s not the same as the old world economic model. If the user accepts ads being put on their pages, they are actually paying in an online sort of way. So, you get what you pay for argument is not really valid. The (‘free’) service may be theirs, but the content is ours.
The least acceptable could be this: give me back my content and I will look for another ‘free’ service provider, or I will get a ‘non-free’ provider if I can afford it. I want access to my content, and in the case of emails, I want access to them immediately, as soon as the account is blocked. You may have the right to disable my account, but you don’t have the right to take away my content. This, of course, applies to all service providers, not just to Google.
I couldn’t agree more. Taking away your ability to send and receive emails over their service is one thing and certainly within Google’s rights (though absurd in this case). But taking away your ability to read your own email is basically theft. In the old case where everyone used POP, this wasn’t an issue because you downloaded email to your computer and the burden of saving and protecting it was left up to you. Having email in the cloud presents an interesting (and dangerous) set of issues for user and provider alike.. I guess if you used Google desktop, you’d have a personal record of all your gmail items (and of course you could always download it via pop/imap to make a backup). Personally I hate using old-style email (like outlook) due to the fact that I’ve lost all my email multiple times to random crashes using every major email program out there. Google desktop is a drain on my computer’s resources, so I haven’t it used either. Looks like I might have to now if this is happening to you, but I’ll miss the days when I could trust Google.
Right, especially considering the fact that Google is very actively promoting something like a ‘Web based desktop’ with Google documents etc. Many people trust Google so much that they are actually putting their important documents online using the Google accounts. And many others are storing vital information as email drafts. Disabling the account completely is like locking you out of your own office, even if the office was a low rent one. Given the ads, I don’t think it’s a zero rent one, but even if it was a zero rent office, you still have right to your belongings which are locked inside the office.
In the case of emails, if the service provider decides to disable some account, the decent way will be to do two things: give the user access to old mails and forward the new mails to the user’s alternative address (or any other address which user specifies). This shouldn’t be very difficult to implement.