Legislation to protect e-mail mailboxes as the same way we do with official postal (snail-)mail services in most countries needs to be handled very carefully, because otherwise we'll end up protecting spammers - the very opposite of the people we want to protect.

I see this story as Google's equivalent of when Valve would ban people from Steam for crude comments they made on the Steam forums, which I understand meant they forfeited their entire game library - or Amazon banning people for reviews.

If there is going to be any law or legislation - it should be to require service companies like Google, Valve and Amazon to treat the customer's "online personality account" (i.e. forum account, "community" account, etc) separately from their "value" account (i.e. whatever that which has _value_, be it their Steam library, their GMail mailbox, etc) - or at the very least, companies must be required to export 100% of the data in an account and providing that to the customer/user in the event they shut down an account (with reasonable constraints, such as the account having existed for at least 3 months and having been in good-standing until this specific incident, etc).

And under no circumstances should anyone lose their software copyright licenses for violating a community ToS - feel free to ban them from the forums, et cetera, but being banned from the Steam forums must not mean they lose the right to play the copy of Half-Life 2 that they paid for.

Nit: Valve just banned them from forums, not Steam. They already do what you're proposing.

Got a link? I remember reading that people were banned from their Steam accounts entirely without any refunds and they had to resort to CC chargebacks.

No link, but I got a personal anecdote.

I found a persistent XSS vulnerability on steamcommunity.com once upon a time. It used to be if you were playing a mod, the name of the mod could be shown in activity graphs and screenshot views. This was not sanitized whatsoever.

After 4 weeks of no response from their official email contact, I posted it on the (then entirely detached vBulletin based) Steam forums, with a notice I had disclosed the issue to all known to me @valvesoftware.com email addresses (including security@, which didn't bounce)

I had my account disabled, and spent 3 weeks emailing them asking what the fuck that was all about. It got re-enabled silently.

Well, fairly simple to solve; mail services should be able to restrict sending mail (possibly only to family contact, limit of 25 contacts or so) until the matter is handled, ie temporarily if it's not blatant abuse of the service (ie spam). Otherwise, receiving mail should be a right once you have a mail address at a larger provider.

Why isn't "use a different email provider" an option? Why do we need laws to enforce good customer service?

For a large part of the population, losing their email account could be devastating. "Could" is deliberate, because once you lose it you wouldn't even know whether anything important landed in your inbox. Like a personal update from a friend, or some official business you need to respond to within days. Can you imagine trying to remember every single friend, business and government agency which might conceivably contact you, and figuring out how to contact each of them to let them know of your new email, plus getting them to re-send anything since you were blocked? It could put a wrench into someone's life for days or weeks.

I understand the problems losing access to your email can cause, in fact, I have experienced this exact problem several years ago. It took me 3 weeks to recover my email, and after that experience I switched from gmail to protonmail.

Most people won’t switch until something like this happens to them. We shouldn’t go, “just switch!” because it won’t work. And we definitely shouldn’t go, “screw you if you didn’t switch because you didn’t listen”

Yeah, the reason most people don't switch is because it doesn't happen to most people, ever. If you don't like a company's service you switch to a different one, that's how capitalism works, especially services you pay nothing to use.