[smt88]

Your fear is rational. It's happened to other people. I would suggest going to a paid provider like Fastmail and checking their terms of service. I don't know of any protections that exist by law at the moment.

My horror story:

I have a mentally ill relative who only logged in every 6 months. He got treatment and wanted to resume using his email account. Guess what? Google thought his activity was "suspicious" and permanently locked him out. We went through an infuriating loop of proving his identity, then getting a message saying a human was reviewing it. Then we'd go back to proving his identity. This went on for 15-20 cycles over the course of 8 months.

The only way to get out of it was to contact my friend who works for Google. Otherwise my relative had lost gigabytes of irreplaceable data. We would've gladly paid $1,000+ for the privilege of talking to a real human about it, but that's impossible.

[catacombs]

That's infuriating. Something similar happened to my friend a few months ago. He couldn't log in to his Google account for weeks because the company took forever to verify his identity.

The fact Google doesn't have a way for people to talk to a human during a crisis is moronic. That's why I've moved off Google with as much stuff as possible.

I don't think I'd have the patience to deal with something like this and rely on automated systems to deal with my problems.

[surewhynat]

I logged into an old hotmail email to recover a related account, and it had deleted all my messages because I hadn't been active for 12 months.

The more I think about it, we really do need a more distributed architecture. The whole concept of "the cloud" really sucks

[jolmg]

Email is about as distributed as it gets. How would you consider it can be more distributed? If it's about the ability to backup messages, you can do that with any MRA (Mail Retrieval Agent) program like mbsync/isync[1], or offlineimap[2].

[1] http://isync.sourceforge.net

[2] http://offlineimap.org/

[throwaway156503]

Thank you for sharing this. This is one of the types of issues that I’m afraid of: the insulation Google has from its users. I don’t believe I could simply call a legal representative or get in touch with the staff of an elected official to resolve such a matter.