Re:Google account suspended: A post mortem
by jacquesm on Friday August 07, 2009 @01:00AM
(#747038)
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.
Re:Google account suspended: A post mortem
by patio11 on Friday August 07, 2009 @02:23AM
(#747142)
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.
Re:Google account suspended: A post mortem
by jacquesm on Friday August 07, 2009 @02:31AM
(#747153)
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).
Re:Google account suspended: A post mortem
by Ardit20 on Friday August 07, 2009 @08:57AM
(#747490)
well, technically speaking you do pay for Google as well, just not in the traditional way of handing money in return for something, but the more ancient way of handing something in return for something.
Re:Google account suspended: A post mortem
by jyothi on Friday August 07, 2009 @02:20AM
(#747138)
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.
Re:Google account suspended: A post mortem
by tsuraan on Friday August 07, 2009 @07:49AM
(#747428)
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?
Re:Google account suspended: A post mortem
by jcl on Friday August 07, 2009 @10:28AM
(#747610)
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.
Re:Google account suspended: A post mortem
by revertts on Friday August 07, 2009 @04:18AM
(#747263)
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.
Re:Google account suspended: A post mortem
by sahaj on Friday August 07, 2009 @02:03AM
(#747116)
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.
Re:Google account suspended: A post mortem
by ovi256 on Friday August 07, 2009 @06:03AM
(#747354)
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.
Re:Google account suspended: A post mortem
by aerique on Friday August 07, 2009 @04:03AM
(#747247)
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.
Re:Google account suspended: A post mortem
by adrinavarro on Friday August 07, 2009 @07:32AM
(#747412)
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).
Re:Google account suspended: A post mortem
by rfreytag on Friday August 07, 2009 @12:14PM
(#747836)
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.
Re:Google account suspended: A post mortem
by anirbas on Friday August 07, 2009 @09:24AM
(#747511)
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.
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!
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.
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).
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.
When you really think about it if you are a single user you do not actually need google docs.
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.
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).
"There was no mention from Google as to why my account was suspended"
Unreal.