Why I love Gmail
Until I read Jeff Tucker’s piece today about the POP-mail generation, I had almost completely forgotten why I fell in love with Gmail in the first place.
It’s not the way it organizes my email, or the incredible spam-filtering. The real reason I love Gmail is that I’ve tried just about every email client known to man, and they all eventually crash, resulting in either a tremendous waste of time trying to clean it up or a total loss of data. With Gmail, the burden to keep things working is on Google, not me. No more strange error messages, no more searches that take five minutes, no more repairing of databases, no more worrying. It just works. And if it ever stops working, they’ll have millions of unhappy customers to answer to, and thus great incentive to rapidly fix it. Whereas, if Outlook breaks, I’m just plain fucked.
Monday, December 17th 2007 at 7:12 pm
I started loving Gmail for the same reasons you did, but now I am having the same concern about Gmail that you now have about Facebook (as revealed in your discussion down below). Apparently Facebook has refused to explain how you are supposedly violating their TOU, but has continued to send you warning messages such as this one you quoted: “Your behavior indicates that you may be in violation of Facebook’s Terms of Use. Continued misuse of Facebook’s features could result in your account being disabled.”
As frustrating and unfair as that seems to be, it is not as bad as what some people are experiencing with Gmail. I had 3 Gmail accounts. Account #2 was used exclusively to receive an automatically forwarded copy of everything that entered Account #1, as a backup for the very valuable information coming into #1 (an idea that I got from one of the Gmail discussion groups).
Now account #2 has suddenly been disabled by Google, with no
explanation, with the generic implication that it MIGHT have been
because I violated the Terms of Service–and that I should read the
TOS again before registering for another account. I have re-read the
TOS, and have no idea what I would have unwittingly violated–IF that
is what happened.
While there is no data loss at this point, since it was exclusively a
backup account anyway, it is deeply alarming to think that the same
thing could happen to either of my other two Gmail accounts, neither
of which now has any backup. I NEED TO KNOW WHY GOOGLE DISABLED THAT ACCOUNT. CAN ANYONE TELL ME HOW TO FIND OUT?
Why would Google expect that anyone could have confidence in the
security of a Gmail account if Google can suddenly disable it (the
same as deleting it, from the standpoint of the account holder),
without warning or explanation???????
That threat is the more profoundly disturbing in light of the
following account disaster that was recently posted by Google (Dec. 2
@ 8:26 p.m.).
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Re: Disabled Account: Entirety of my College Course Work
As of this morning Google has disabled my account.
I am a college student and I have all of my study guides, projects,
papers, etc. saved within my gmail account.
No I did not back them up on a hard drive.
I figured Google, being of the most respected companies in the world,
would have far safer/dependable storage than anything I might have.
Finals start in a few days and if I do not gain access to my account
by then it is impossible that I will pass any of my classes.
I do not have time to remake my materials and my only hope is Google
restoring my account very shortly.
I have sent roughly 15 emails to them today alone.
I called the main office but was unable to get a hold of anyone.
I am very desperate at this point as 5 months of my life and thousands
of my dollars are at stake if I am unable to access my account and
pass my courses.
I would greatly appreciate any information that anyone might have.
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This is scary stuff, when Google suddenly disables/deletes people’s Gmail accounts, without warning or explanation, and provides no way to retrieve irreplaceable information.