[overgard]

Somewhat of a sidenote, but this is why I refuse to use google+: my gmail account is too important to me to risk of linking it to another google service. Especially considering the stories of people's entire google accounts getting shutdown randomly because of an "algorithm" or whatever.

I like the products google makes, but their complete refusal to have any sort of customer service makes me hesitant to rely on them for anything beyond what I trust them with now.

[alanfalcon]

My Google+ account was suspended because I had entered my "real name" as "Alan / Falcon" when I signed up since I was using the service as a kind of meta social network for online friends who I didn't know personally and wanted to keep that separation between my real identity and my meta identity. I'm sure if I'd omitted the slash I wouldn't have been suspended, and my name is definitely not really Alan / Falcon, but the whole thing left a very sour taste in my mouth. I wasn't able to use the network how I wanted so I just left the account in the suspended state, with a giant full screen pop-up appearing every time I followed a link from HN to a G+ post. Fortunately none of the other Google services I used were at all affected, including GMail or Blogger. But I went ahead and finally just updated my name to my real name on Google+ now to avoid a situation like this if Google decides to change its algorithm to something else and flags my permanently suspended account. Note that the account is still suspended so far as I know, pending review of the name change I submitted.

On a related note, I'm actually bummed that iCloud is free. I felt better about access to my data when I was paying yearly for MobileMe, and in fact started recently experiencing some issues getting Mail in Snow Leopard to recognize my iCloud account and finally ended up just upgrading to Lion to resolve the issue. (Yes, the $30 OS upgrade is cheaper than the $99 MobileMe cost, and I'm glad I upgraded because I'm enjoying using Lion, but I dislike how easy it is for Apple to say now that it's a free service they're free to stop supporting anything that isn't the latest iDevice or version of their OS if things happen to work out that way.)

[Drbble]

Apple had no problem killing MobileMe and screwing paying customers.

[oemera]

Why screwed? MobileMe migrated to iCloud seemlessly and you had to pay nothing. Plus the service now is even better for free! I don't see that people get screwed.

[kennywinker]

"Even better"... more like different. MobileMe and iCloud have a fairly different feature set. If you used one of the things that was in MobileMe but not iCloud... too bad.

[microtonal]

Right. And Apple provided paying MobileMe customers with 25GB of storage for free the first year. However, with the lack of an iDisk replacement, it's pretty hard to use up that space.

In other words, that what we did get, is pretty useless.

[rbarooah]

Sure but iDisk was little more than a generic WebDAV service, so you could easily replace it with a service from another provider with the money saved.

[dwc]

No, your email is that important to you, but you're trusting it to a company that may lock you out with no recourse or apparent reason. You can do your best to play nice and hope it doesn't happen, but that's just hope.

The good news is that the odds are on your side. Most people do not, of course, get their account shut down willy-nilly. But if it happens you're pretty much out of luck.

[Auguste]

This. If you're really worried about the safety of your Gmail account, maybe it's time to consider moving your email somewhere else. Sure, you can back your email up, but if your account is suspended you'll still lose access to your address.

I moved my email over to Fastmail.fm, a subscription email service, around 8 months ago. They've been in the business since 1999 and seem to be pretty reliable. The web interface and price obviously doesn't compare to Gmail, but all the other features are there.

[microtonal]

If you're really worried about the safety of your Gmail account, maybe it's time to consider moving your email somewhere else. Sure, you can back your email up, but if your account is suspended you'll still lose access to your address.

Or: use Google Apps for Domains, so that you can easily switch to another mail service when necessary, and have one machine make a backup with offlineimap.

[codeka]

This. Also, if you use Google Apps for Business then it's only $50 per year and you get a dedicated, 24/7 support phone number you can call.

Seriously, Gmail is free, you really can't complain about something that's free (yes, I know you "pay" by looking at ads, but when you can upgrade to the "premium" service for $50, never have to look at another ad again and get 24/7 phone support, why wouldn't you?)

[sirn]

>The web interface and price obviously doesn't compare to Gmail

Their new web interface currently in beta at https://beta.fastmail.fm/ is very nice. I've been using it (the new interface) for few months and don't feel like I want to go back to Gmail at all. (Then again I don't use labels in Gmail, so your mileage may vary.)

[dmd]

I'd love to use fastmail, but at least when I last tried it (two years ago) at least 1/10 messages I sent just vanished. Never went to my sent folder, never got delivered.

And today, you tell me to go to beta.fastmail.fm ... a site that looks like this: http://o7.no/IPvfHo

Note broken images, missing Latest News, and they can't even spell Fastmail correctly (see below "Login to your account"). This does not inspire confidence.

[sirn]

Their beta front page has been like that since forever and I'm not sure why it hasn't been fixed. Regardless of such blunder, I've been using FastMail reliably for almost two years and the only problem I've ever had was when DynDNS decided to no longer response to +recurse query (which they fixed it pretty quickly, within 12 hours, faster than it takes DynDNS Support to even response).

[Off topic: I think FastMail support system is pretty lame; despite being an email service, the only way to contact their support is via... web interface. They have few weird quirk like this but it's not something I couldn't live with.]

[pyre]

Looks like those image urls resolve on the fastmail.fm domain, but not the beta.fastmail.fm domain:

https://beta.fastmail.fm/pages/fastmail/images/fmlogo_horiz_...

vs.

https://fastmail.fm/pages/fastmail/images/fmlogo_horiz_320.p...

[yaix]

Same here, would like to use Docs more and use Picasa more, but I don't want to risk losing gmail access.

[jfoster]

You can get backups of Docs & Picasa: https://www.google.com/takeout/

Gmail should let you download all emails into an email client, but the point people are making about losing access to the address itself remains very valid.

Would be interesting to know if anyone has ever lost access to their account and filed suit in an attempt to get it back. Current MegaUpload case is a bit different, but related.

[DavidAbrams]

These sites (Google, Facebook) pull shit like this and then hide from their users.

People need to think things through before uploading all of their stuff to "the cloud." The network is a transmission medium, not a place to keep things. If you own a connected server, that's one thing. But why trust all of your data to some third party who can pull the plug on a whim and leave you with no recourse?

Here's Microsoft's moronic account-recovery procedure for an inexplicably blocked Hotmail account. It's IMPOSSIBLE to follow the directions:

http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5306/5773538918_fa4af1de42_b.j...

[jrockway]

But GoDaddy can pull my DNS name just as easily. Or my ISP can cancel my hosting account. Or the government can break into my house and steal my desktop.

There is no such thing as a safe system with one point of failure. No matter what medium you use to store data, you must always have a backup. It's the only way to be sure.

(Personally, I pay the $5 a month for a Google Apps account. It's convenient to let Google host my email, but if something goes wrong, I can always change my MX record and start collecting my own incoming mail again. And, I don't have to block ads anymore :)

[john61]

I have two small servers (plug computer) on two different locations / providers / IP addresses with all my data. They are synced by rsync. That is my own small redundant cloud. Not expensive and quite easy to setup with some Linux knowledge.

[pyre]

I'd be curious to see a write-up of this. What are the details? Since these are plug computers are they just at two residential locations, or are they actually in co-lo? How do your keep your desktop/laptops in sync? Remote mount? also rsync?

[john61]

I have a house and a flat 120 km away from each other. One is the master the other the slave. The master is read/write the slave read only for the clients. They are mounted with sshfs (not ideal with interrupted WiFi connections / reconnect issues, might switch to WebDAV) by the clients Laptops, Desktop, Nokia N900es etc.. They sync with a cron job. Also they test if clients are nearby (Wifi) and rsynces them for backup purposes. The main data is all on the master/slave servers. I sync manually to clients if necessary for offline work(driving by train etc.)

The plug computer is a Sheeva plug. There is a low power WD USB 1 TB drive connected, power consumption in idle is <5 W.

[pyre]

Thanks for replying. I imagine you also have some sort of backup regiment outside of the 'cloud.'

[DavidAbrams]

Ha, you're right: GoDaddy would and DOES rip off customers and screw them by capriciously pulling their domains:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/03/godaddy-silence

In support of your (and my) point: Local storage is now dirt-cheap, small in size, and spacious. Exactly the WRONG time to start turning your data over to someone else to store "in the cloud."

[jrockway]

Storage is cheap, but administering a well-secured mail server is difficult. Providing search and spam filtering is even more difficult. There's a reason why people pay others to maintain email servers: it's hard.

[DavidAbrams]

Sure E-mail, but not things like media storage.

[ajross]

"The stories" are sort of an exaggeration. My memory is that Google did that (disabling a gmail account while freezing a google+ account) once, apparently by mistake, and corrected it within something like 48 hours. Are there other examples I've forgotten?

[bitcrunch]

It is not an exaggeration.

It has happened to me - I lost everything, calendar, email, g+ (which I had not ever updated and had no ToS violations on), absolutely everything.

In the next two days I googled (yes, I did) for answers while receiving automated messages that seemed to indicate I was never getting my accounts back (submitted the form they asked me to, but nothing came of it).

I lost my appointments, contacts, and had business people doubt my veracity, as I'd just given my gmail to several new contacts and their initial emails all bounced.

If I hadn't had multiple friends inside of google I might never have gotten my accounts back, and I heard they weren't even sure what exactly happened other than a confluence of events. I then learned how very very common it is to lose a google account and never know why, and never be able get back anything on them (family pictures, phone numbers stored in contact lists...)

I'm now mostly divested from google and the things I still have there I now have backups and redundancies for.

[GFischer]

My mother had her account hacked.. she never got it back, despite trying repeatedly.

And she had all of her digital life in there.

She made for herself another Gmail account which she has safeguarded a lot more, but it's still chilling to know that you have no recourse.

Gmail is so convenient, that it's hard not to use it, but I'd pay for customer service.

[sireat]

Your mother didn't have multiple friends inside Google.

This is the story we hear again and again - you CAN get customer service from Google if you have contacts inside or you can raise a big stink at some forum that Googlers read.

[maratd]

> but I'd pay for customer service.

So pay for it? I'm not saying that it's right for Google to do this, but they do offer that option. With a Google Apps subscription, you get support.

[ubernostrum]

Many, many times we've heard these stories from even paying customers of Google.

Generally, if it can't be implemented by an algorithm, Google's not going to do it, ever.

[alexqgb]

Confirmed. When I say Google supplied me with the single worst customer service I've ever had, I do mean customer. Not user. Customer.

e.g. "24/7 Support" meant I was free to sent them an e-mail anytime, day or night. Or I could call the 800 line and leave a message ("Calls are usually returned within two business days!").

When I did get through this way, I had to run a gauntlet to convince the asshole (and he was an asshole) that I'd exhausted every imaginable self service option before having the audacity to call for help directly - even though this was the exact service I was paying for.

Seriously, you'd think I'd called 911 to report that I was running out of milk and eggs. In reality, my accounts had vanished completely. Business accounts, I might add. Not that it mattered to Google.

Like an earlier commenter noted - if you use Google for anything that matters, you'll probably be okay. After all, the odds are in your favor. But if you do get screwed, you get screwed completely, suddenly, and without warning. And that's true of customers and users alike.

[aperrien]

With paying customers? That will continue until they face their first lawsuit...

[FooBarWidget]

That's what I thought. When Google Apps for businesses came out I was interested in subscribing, so I asked their customer support about what migration paths they offer. I never heard back from them.

[gcb]

Uh, have you even read the linked article?

a PAYING customer of gmail lost his account.

[codeka]

He's paying for Gmail+Docs storage, that's not the same as Google Apps for Business. If he were paying for Google Apps for Business then he has a 24/7 support phone number that he can call.

[vaksel]

yeah you shouldn't need to have friends inside Google to get basic customer service

[abraham]

It sounds more like your Google account was disabled for some reason and it had nothing to do with your G+ profile.

[overgard]

Even if the stories are an exaggeration (which I doubt), the complete lack of any sort of human support is problematic. I get why a company of google's scale relies on heuristics to identify issues, but it's /really really important/ that when those things go wrong -- as they certainly will -- there's some sort of recourse.

The black box google currently presents makes me uninterested in trusting them, since to do so would present a lot of risk (losing my email) with very little reward (a sort-of-better facebook clone).

[mjwalshe]

Yes and what Google does not seem to realise that there is a lot of legal precedent and custom and practice that expects that if someone is penalized there is some sort of appeal process.

[losvedir]

Well there was that kid who lost access to his gmail account once he put his real birthday into G+.

[Drbble]

Because he was underage and it was illegal for Google to serve him email?

[pyre]

I don't think that it's technically illegal to serve email to someone under 13 years of age. That's just the conservative take on the law that most sites have taken.

[You may be able to allow < 13 year olds with parent's permission, but most sites probably feel that it's too much effort/risk to do that.]

[Steko]

Linked article? Other people in this thread?

[loverobots]

"Examples" and stats aren't worth a damn thing when it happens to you. When Google tweaks things and you're caught in the middle, 100% of your e-mail, Adsense, Adwords, Apps, GAN, Docs or whatever is cut off with almost zero recourse.