Mine was banned with no notice after weeks of work. So I'm just putting this out there as a warning that gmail can crush you at any time with no recourse.

Of course they can - but that is yet another reason to rather rely on multiple gmail accounts if the alternative is a single gmail account.

If you use a single gmail account, it seems far less likely to get banned. I think I was caught in some sort of automatic purge, since I certainly wasn't abusing anything or using it for much beyond my side projects.

This email hostage situation kind of sucks. Hopefully there's an alternative for scenarios like this.

Someone mentioned self-hosting upthread. I wonder how difficult that is.

I have numerous Gmail accounts (more than 20) and not a single one has been banned. And Google explicitly supports using multiple accounts by providing an account switcher. Perhaps your account was banned for some reason other than being a duplicate.

Maybe so, but they won't tell me why it was banned. That alone should give people pause. There were a lot of resources tied to that account.

Here's the closest thing to a list of reasons I could find: https://www.google.com/intl/en-US/%2B/policy/content.html

I didn't engage in illegal activities, malicious or deceptive practices, hate speech, harassment, distributing personal information, child exploitation, spam, ranking manipulation, distribution of sexually explicit material, violence, selling regulated goods and services, impersonation, account hijacking, or use multiple accounts to bypass the above policies. So I have no idea what I did -- Google won't say, and all attempts to get more info out of them failed.