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Comment by d2vid | Hacker News Reader

I've been running into bad google experiences lately. I have a work email address that uses google for domains, and my account was completely disabled by google about a week ago with no response yet to my repeated contact attempts. Their error message was not exactly comforting, it included the following:

Google reserves the right to: Terminate your account at any time, for any reason, with or without notice.

I don't particularly care about that particular gmail account, but it's terrifying that they believe they have the right to do the exact same thing to my personal gmail account, which I definitely DO care about. That seems unethical, even if it's perhaps legal.

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Is there any company that doesn't reserve the right to terminate a free hosted email account without notice?

If you want an SLA, you (almost always) have to pay for it. And if you pay for Google Apps, you also get phone support...

In the meantime: IMAP backups. If that's too much of a pain, there are also a ton of services (free or otherwise) which will do automatic backups for you, though you should really (really) make sure you trust them and their security procedures before you hand off access to your primary email account to them.

data backups: this point is moot because, who cares about archived email? that's like 1% of the pain of loosing an account. 99% of the problem is the messages you will never be able to read.

Same with the youtube channel from OP. i'm 100% certain that the guy has all his videos ready for re-upload. but who cares? He had worked hard promoting that channel in several venues and acquiring an audience to THAT channel. That is lost forever.

That is the reason I wrote a Mac app to do just that. Atleast for emails as the parent comment is suggesting.

More on the that: http://thehorcrux.com/why-i-built-horcrux-app/

</shamelessplug>

I've come to assume that, like Paypal, they are trying to go as long as possible without implementing customer service.

You mean Product Service. Because you're their product. They DO have customer service.

Remember, google customers are advertisers.

You're being That Guy. You know what I mean.

Actually if you're using google apps for business, you are a customer.

Also, that bit of snark is getting old and tired, and wasn't ever very accurate to begin with.

It's incredibly accurate.

"In 2011, 96% of Google's revenue was derived from its advertising programs. For the 2006 fiscal year, the company reported $10.492 billion in total advertising revenues and only $112 million in licensing and other revenues."

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