@catfewd: Thats why you set up a second or even 3rd account to synchronize gmail. I have a yahoo and hotmail account that gmail is synched with in addition to downloading locally once a week. I have also been on gmail since day 1.

secgeek

I just got banned from adsense because some idiot thought it'd be funny to click 97 links on my website...

I've decided to boycott google... I'll pop3 all my email, and switch to yahoo search... I think before you shut someone down, like you know everything, perhaps you should be big enough to ask that person some questions.

I used to love google and be a big supporter of their world dominance, after this nonsense, I'm backing msn or yahoo.

patrickcurl

But I like my 7GB of storage, free POP/IMAP, and Gchat... :-/

trendspotter

Ca@crespo: agreed.

Sensationalism worthy of the morning show or 11PM news.

My DVD came broken in half! Is this the end of Netflix?

future-proof

Three words to live by: Diversify you idiots.

FrankenPC

I love google too, but being an incredibly tiny cog in the machine has disadvantages.

We realized that when an intern deleted the wrong account on google analytics. We immediately tried to contact someone to get the data back. But were met with an automated email explaining that couldn't be done, to add insult to injury the automated reply came back in 20 seconds or so, making me think a human never even read it.

Now I'm not sure how mad I have a right to be over this. I wonder if they really do delete such data immediately, or hold onto it for their trends features forever.

I just know that either way our request was not given the slightest look to see if it really could be honored or not. I guess in the end you get what you pay for.

stwf

Scary. Gmail has been my primary mail account since it opened for beta, that's my whole digital life.

catfewd

He probably said something critical of Barak Obama. Or maybe he committed the hate crime of posting the rantings of some Islamist nutjob and pointing out how insane he is.

middy

I have all my domain mail forwarded to google just because the google mail works great. But if they cut me off, I could go back to POP or some Linux free webmail.

Razta

i really dont get the point of this article...

who cares? oh no, his account got disabled, and they reenabled it shortly after! How many times has stuff like this happened from various other companies? Lets all start quitting WoW because my account got suspiciously banned for 72 hours (i dont even play WoW but i hear it all the time)

Zyren

@Gann: Aarrgh!

Kaiser-Machead's BSDM Shenanigans

i still use photobucket and other sources not just Google for everything, though i do love my GOOGLE.

Go Team Venture

This sounds like a slow news day story.

Here's how I would act it back to you: "This guy I know, things changed, but then they changed back....so....watch out man."

Nowledge

why would he pay ? jut make a second account and forward mails to it.

oxweeblexo

@Kaiser-Machead's BSDM Shenanigans: Only if the UPS guy can find it on google maps.

Gann

It has begun... Soon we will all belong to google I tell you. The end is near!

Waka in Japan

"maybe you shouldn't delete that old Hotmail account just yet."

Right -- because MicroSoft would never pull that kind of crap.

bandit

Yowza.....good thing I have several email accounts. If all goes to shit, I at least still have my home address for snail mail.....right? RIGHT???????

Kaiser-Machead's BSDM Shenanigans

Love the picture.
Next up, PTZ online control of the Google "laser".

Razta

Whoa there, Boing Boing's Chris Brogan! Talk about sensationalism...

crespo

he apparently posted something about how great yahoo! was and that didn't sit well with them....

kidding...

lithivm

well, why did they lock him out?

phnxamg

@misterwho: Awesome.

Yeah. I don't know how much stock I put into these stories about Google randomly banning people. Not that they're the perfect company, but that seems out of character for Google to just pull the plug on somebody's entire account and give no explanations.

Also, I still think Flickr is the best online image app. So Google doesn't have ALL the best free programs.

michaelportent

That'll learn you for using Cuil.

OMG! Ponies!

You can always open more gmail account, import all your contacts into those account,Or export your contact list as a Outlook CSV File, Then use windows live mail to access all those accounts. At least if shit goes bad you contact will be stored inside live mail.

wetworker

This sounds like a blanket freeze on accounts with certain characteristics, then unfreezing them as necessary. It happens all the time. The problem is innocent people get inconvenienced. The good thing is it's effective at stopping or at least slowing down the people that did do something wrong (i.e. usually spammers).

geowrian

@GeekyNerdGuy:

lol exactly. I'm sure Nick was just the picture of average Joe Mr. Innocent...

Bluesk1d

@middy: There's a difference?

GadgetPlay

After concluding that Nick was a terrorist, Google swiftly reinstated him, saying: "Sorry, we thought you were a spammer."

misterwho

Is Nick Saber his real name? It sounds fake. Plus, if you rearrange the letters, it spells Sick Naber. And everyone knows sick neighbors look at kiddy porn. So did he have kiddy porn in his inbox or something?

GeekyNerdGuy

@Gann: I ship nothing via UPS (Pronounced OOPS) when I can help it. Items tend to end up looking as if they've been delivered via international trebuchet if it even arrives on time (23 packages to date delayed due to plane problems, all personal packages), if at all.

Bleah

I just download all of my g-mail via IMAP daily. That way I have a copy of everything.

Xavoc

Yeah, great story.

I'm going back to playing Crash Bandicoot at work.

My boss, "What are you doing?"
"Looking for a contact on my phone why?"

BB7

....don't put all your eggs in one basket comes to mind....

aec007

@OMG! Ponies!: You use the word "using" as if it's not impossible.

More like "visiting Cuil and realizing it's completely incapable of functioning."

karasu is my homeboy

This same thing happened to me, but with Yahoo, 8 or so years ago. No explanation whatsoever, after multiple attempts. Lost everything, including my BillPay service, which was prepaid.

Naturally, I followed the customer service guy's advice... and created a new account.

14limes

Google had our company info wrong on Google maps. An intern tried to update it and it took hours and hours just to get the correction submitted to the right area. Still hasn't been updated.

Sora57

Funny thing, I don't even use Google other than the search engine.

Pressure

I have been a HUGE fan of Google for a lot of years now. I am seriously thinking of switching my stuff over to my LIVE account. It appears Windows Live is getting to have more stuff then Google. The Sky drive is the main thing that is luring me in. As for this guy... ...there had to be some reason they did this. What are they not telling us in this article? Either way. Google is becoming what Microsoft was in the 90's. Everyone complains about Microsoft, but they are a reliable company and back their products. Of course Apple does to and if i could afford Mobile Me, believe me I would use it.

tekman94

I find it surprising that everybody thinks these big web company's give a damn about you.

you all have to ok an agreement when using their services that gives them the right to do anything they want !.

.

xenoastro

Seriously what did you expect? My Gmail account is basically my garbage and junk account. I can't for the life of me understand how people use things like Google calendar and what not where you put your entire schedule in there. I mean seriously people need to be way more careful before trusting any of these ONLINE ADVERTISING COMPANIES with anything that is valuable or irreplaceable.

Understand that Google, Yahoo, MSN whatever are all basically advertising companies. Just because they offer all this cool stuff that invites you to put more and more of your personal data out there doesn't make it smart to actually put your "life" on some advertising company's server.

I like Google, but I don't buy the "do no evil" slogan for more than a nanosecond.

sxr7171

@middy: Check it out.

unspellable

stop all the fear-mongering and tell us why they blocked him. You can also just skip that and tell us how much Microsoft had paid you.

monomyth

That's what you get when you rely on free services, no formal contract, they can do whatever they want. I'll stick with my .mac (mobileme).

Shabbis

my hotmail only gets me spam...
their filters sucks.
google spam filter is awesome!

Ariel_Wollinger

Gmail allows you download your messages to Outlook, Outlook Express and Mozilla Thunderbird. So why not use one of these programs as a backup? At least you would have any important emails that have been sent to you. NOTE: I completely understand that it is major to be locked out of your account. I'm just trying to suggest something that might be helpful if your account it locked.

Everyone using Google Services and Gmail should login and make sure they have the correct info in their account along with a Security Question and Alternate Email: [www.google.com] . Go there now and make sure everything is correct.

When Gmail first went from Invite Only Beta to a Public Beta they asked people for their cell phone numbers in order to limit robots, programs and mass spammers the ability to use gmail. Why not offer something like that again - in order to verify your details, who you are and just in case something like this happens.

I know when I signed up for a listing in Google Local they sent me a postcard via mail with a code on it that I had to use to verify my address. Then when I signed up for Adsense they had to have my Social Security number in order to make sure income tax information was sent to the IRS. So Google has just about every detail (except my banking account and routing numbers - I haven't signed up for Google Checkout yet) about me in their databases.

The Nemrel

Wait. You are seriously Gizzing this temporary issue that was fixed by Google. Let's report on a real issue.

dsenier

i think the truly scary thing is what if google's servers die? what if their backups fail? most people on imap are going to be screwed.

@Nowledge: You'll go far here whining about the news stories.

Paradise

This is a major concern. It definitely makes you think twice about placing all your eggs in one Google basket.

That would suck you couldn't get to all your important emails, documents, etc.

Great Post!

yoshi

A year ago google disabled my gmail account and after repeated emails nothing was resolved. I never got a response or reason for why my account was disabled. It was so ridiculous. I emailed every available contact listed on their site but nothing. So I lost all of my contacts and emails. Yeah I still use gmail but made sure that each account forwards to my hotmail and other email accounts so that I always have a backup.

TDBURN

@Zyren: maybe the point of the story is that the guy got locked out without given an explanation. it's fine for someone to lock anyone out, but it just seems odd that there wasn't any hint of reason. it's my guess so who knows...

people who get banned for periods at a time on WoW is done probably because of harassment, cheating, or any such things that get reported by other players. perhaps a reason why someone would claim they were suspiciously banned is because they don't want to admit they were cheating or think that racial slurs aren't considered harassment.

phrequency

@karasu is my homeboy: I'm not sure how good the search results are, but it looks like it's not blowing up as much as it used too... And if you search for "cuil" it actually finds it, which is good.

Rabid Penguin

hotmail ftw!

OLYON

you forgot to mention they take your privacy away... selling any info about you (taken from your calendars appointments, emails, maps locations, etc) to anyone with the biggest bag of money.

DMF

Not so fast on keeping the hotmail account. Same thing happened to me recently with those guys.

plastikwaren

This is why I have multiple google accounts. You just have all your mail forwarded to a backup account and share all your documents and calendar with that same backup account. It gives you multiple points of access.

Navin R Johnson

@Waka in Japan: "all your google [accounts] are belong to us" is something that might just be a real mantra Googleburg. laugh all you want.

froggy

It's almost like... something bad could happen almost ANYWHERE! Armed with this new knowledge, I'll be hiding under my bed if anyone needs me!

kapitan

fact is "all eggs in one basket" isnt really good. they arent saying stick with hotmail, they are saying keep hotmail or yahoo or any other, just in case. unlikely that all services will die at the same time.

alukard

I'm so dependent on google... Can/Will they make gmail pay somehow eventually? (lol when it leaves beta) omg..

dapoktan

This is why I pay a full-time hosting company for my web-space and email.

Petezah

THis happened to me twice, and what the hell is the point of having a security question if they don't let you answer it until you're locked out for 10 days. Not to mention, having a secondary email to recover information is annoying. If we're using such a good service for 3 years, do you think we still check that other email address? No, a lot of them time you let your old email addys die if you've had a reliable one for a few years. Also, there is no one to call, it's really pretty annoying, if google wants to be the best, they have to step up their customer service and help people who get screwed and lose their access to all of their business. I set up a yahoo mail so the google address forwards emails to the yahoo, just in case i get locked out again. Google better step up their game before I send them g4rbage packetz with my l33t m0dded speak n spell.

Pancakeface

hotmail is actually my most reliable net mail account. I had it for 5 years and no problenm what so ever.

dhlt25

@Shabbis: Except it clearly said that he is a paying google customer. So that kind of defeats your point that it's free and you shouldn't rely on it...

smcallah

I pay something like $20/yr for my domain name and use it for my email, which forwards to google via an MX record. If they disable my account, I'll just point my email somewhere else. Also, I occasionally backup everything that I've got stored online - you can use mbsync on linux, for instance, to backup your entire gmail account via IMAP. Most other stuff is wgettable (contacts, bookmarks, calendar).

The only thing I have trouble with it the stuff that I have stored on google notebook - the API isn't complete enough to be able to wget the data.

You can get the advantages of keeping all your data online and still keep ownership of the important part.

fatbob

Yeah, keep the hotmail account that deletes all of your e-mail after 90 days of inactivity. Oh, go ahead and log on to MSN messenger all you want, but it still gets deleted.

orangesrhyme

My favorite Google product is their Windows Mobile map tool. It's free and it supports the GPS built into my HTC phone.... Sprint wants to charge for it and Google's is free and there are no ads !

I hope they don't shut it down randomly on me sometime when I'm lost.... That's probably why they had that license notice "By using this program you agree to the terms of service...." and the terms were.... if this thing steers you wrong or is unavailable and drive off a cliff because of it, you're shit-out-of-luck.

chrism123

To me, this was a perfectly reasonable reaction by Google. He was phished, and someone used his Google Checkout account without his knowledge. Google's response is here:
[www.chrisbrogan.com]

poedgirl

Hotmail! Ha ha! Wow, I'd rather send smoke signals than use Hotmail. It had a two megabyte storage limit until a few years ago, when Gmail essentially forced Microsoft to increase it. I can't count the number of messages I had to delete back when I used that service. I could probably have put all that lost mail in my Gmail account and still had room for more!

ManekiNeko

Is that Google Earth with a freaking laser beam attached to it?!

aaj111

Oh Adam F, your unparalleled journalistic skill never ceases to amaze. I smell a Pulitzer!!

avconsumer2

This perhaps applies to all those Moe-Bile Me's just as well as Nick Saber. So while IMAP is great and all, be sure to have a pop account on the side saving your data, JIC someone at Apple or Google gets a funny idea.
Also, with these single vendor technologies ....[www.spiritof76quilts.com] .

JunoonX

This is why i run my own Xserve mailserver.

If i get locked out its because i forgot to:

A) pay the cable/dsl bill (yup have both at the office)
B) forgot the passwords
C) forgot to pay the electric bill

But hey Google isnt evil right....not like Apple right...i mean Google says they wont do evil so they wont right.

Wowwzers2

I'm locked out for 2.5 years now, for predicting that 'Don't be evil' will turn into 'Don't be' before 2015. More of that at my dead Goolocalization blog.

aludal

Stale news. I was blocked out of my blog, then out of the google account 2.5 years ago. My "dead" blog is hanging there still though: [www.goolocalizations.blogspot.com] . Rumors are they didn't like my 3 year old take on their famous motto: 'Don't be evil'. I predicted it will turn into plain 'Don't be' before 2015, and they acted on that very soon.

Of course there was much more serious criticism of goolocalizations there which might be the reason I couldn't get the access to my blog all this time.

aludal

This is exactly why I abandoned yahoo 4 years ago. I was a paying customer, they shut me off with no warning for no reason, their customer support was a loop of email telling me to send email to the address that I had just sent email to, and there was absolutely no way talk to a human.

This is why I wouldn't be beholden to any one company, and you've got to have your own local backups.

kkw

?

bfehler

hmmm for a slow news day this post is really generating a fortune of interest...

Do Google offer a service where we can download our entire mailbox ? Ive got 16mb broadband, no worries about speed here !

bfehler

That's just it. Google never told Nick why they downed him. Nothing at all in several emails back and forth. And okay, so 24 hours isn't the end of the world. But if it were forever and it was shut out? Makes you rethink what you do with that suite. Right?

BrighamGwar

This happened to me last week. Identical situation. My account was unexplicably disabled for no apparent reason. I suspect it may have been related to the activites of someone else with a very similar name and gmail account for whom I was always getting erroneus e-mail, but that's a total shot in the dark. I had been using g-mail as my primary mail account for 4 or 5 years, and I haven't been able to get it back, unlike this guy. I got the same boiler plate response (...investigation was inconclusive...) every attempt I've made to get it re-enabled. This seriously screwed me over! This is a very real risk associated with Google's "wonderful" free services. I'm damn unhappy with Google right now. They encourage you to place your digital life in their hands but offer no customer support when they screw you over, mind you since I wasn't a "paying customer" I guess I wasn't entitled to anything. I've switched to Mobile Me with Apple. Hopefully, if I have problems in the future I can count on them to provide some level of service.

ShefaliFazool

@middy: If that had happened, he would have also been called a racist for not supporting Barack Obama.

Nonetheless, Google and any other company should have no right to disable someones account without notifying them first. The police need a search warrant before entering a house, and the same should apply to them.

citylights5

The exact same thing happened to me with Hotmail. I was a paying Hotmail customer. £14.99 a year, when one day they deleted two years worth of email. And seemed quite annoyed when I emailed them (from a new account I had to set up) to ask them what was going on? I never did find out. All they would say was that they couldn't comment on it, and further emails on the matter would go unacknowledged. I called Microsoft support but they said hotmail was a different department, one contactable only be email. You couldn't make it up its so crazy.

CMBmovies

I hope google comes out with a church soon.

aliskaba