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Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

I had my google account suspended for a few hours a few months back. Why? Because, I was sending myself a set of icons, and I carelessly dragged the folder in, which caused each one to upload separately (30 altogether). I noticed it quickly enough, and closed the tab. When I went back in, my account was suspended. No recourse. Nobody to talk to. Nobody to complain to.

Honestly, I'd rather just pay a monthly fee for the damn thing if it meant a unilateral action such as an account suspension wouldn't happen without prior warning. I'm serious Google. It's a good service. Take my money.

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I rely on google so much, I would certainly pay for support if the option was available.

Isn't that what Google apps for business offers?

I don't know if you can port an @gmail.com email address in, but if you have your own domain for $5 / user / month you get phone + email support.

Yes it is. The SLA is 99.9% uptime until you do something against their terms of service, but even then you'll still have somebody call and complain to.

Also, I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure it's standard to set it up on your own domain and forward data from any gmail.com addresses you care about.

I tried to use their service to do that recently since I do like the GMail interface, but I couldn't create an account. The domain name had apparently already been used with them by a previous owner. There was no obvious way to fix it other than to kick someone else out of their gmail (as far as I could tell -- I'm not sure what exactly would be reset in the process), and no way to contact customer service unless you already had an account. Since I couldn't safely create an account without talking to customer support, and couldn't talk to customer support unless I created an account I was stuck in a catch-22. By that point, I realized that I don't want to deal with yet another god-damned unsupported Google product and made other arrangements. Hell, I would have been willing to pay $5/mo at the time too -- it'd be a lot easier than what I had to go through to get my mail working. Maybe their support is fantastic once you get an account working; I don't know -- I couldn't get that far to find out.

Forgive my ignorance, what would uploading 30 icons have to do with being suspended?

Ditto. I find it hard to believe that receiving 30 attachments in quick succession would trigger an IDS. People do that sort of thing all the time (try playing with "git send-email" sometime).

My guess is that it was more like 300, and cc'd to a bunch of external addresses such that it looked like spam.

So macspoofing: what did you have to do to get the account reenabled?

>I find it hard to believe that receiving 30 attachments in quick succession would trigger an IDS.

Believe it. It happened.

>what did you have to do to get the account reenabled?

Waited a few hours, and it was reenabled automagically.

There are hacks out there that use Gmail as a sort of Dropbox. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMail_Drive These can get your account locked (https://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ... see #3).

I bet that uploading a bunch of files all at once could trigger that lock.

I wish I knew.

Out of curiosity, what about gmail is so important that you dont move to a different mail client (paid or otherwise)? Or is it simply the fact that you haven't found an alternative that you like?

GMail isn't just a mail client though; it's a web server and a client with push email, calendar syncing, etc; it's basically a simpler version of Exchange.

Are there any good alternatives? Are their any alternatives at all?

Yahoo Mail has pretty much the same services and it's based on Zimbra. It's pretty good.

Gmail is a brand name, it's like having a .com.

You can use a gmail.com address and still download all the emails to a client running on your computer.

It's partly inertia and knowing that it would be a hassle to switch email addresses. But also, I think it's a phenomenal service. It's quick, and has great ui. Great spam filters. Great security - recently google added two-factor authentication as an option, which I love, since so many services are tied to my gmail account. In addition they have "shadow accounts" for services that need your password to function (usually other email clients) - so if you setup IMAP on your phone, and your phone is stolen, you can simply disable access for that client. The total package is great.

So the problem fixed itself faster than you could get Comcast to come look at a problem with your cable box.

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