Rhymes with "Diploma"

I’ve had a Gmail account since Fri, Jun 25, 2004 at 12:03 PM. I know this because I still have the “Gmail is different. Here’s what you need to know…” message.

I don’t remember when I started my second Gmail account, but in the past 5+ years, I have assembled a small collection of Gmail accounts (more than 10, less than 20). Why? For separate projects, true separation is helpful. I want all of my work emails separated from all of my personal emails separate from all of my Twitter/Tumblr/etc emails. Sometimes it’s helpful to be able to give out an email address which is somewhat “disposable” and doesn’t connect to your real identity.

It seemed fine until…

About 6 months ago, one of these ’spare’ accounts was suspended without warning. When I tried to login, I saw this:

No, that isn’t my real Gmail address

Clicking on that “?” link takes you to this page which says:

I’m getting a message that says ‘Sorry, your account has been disabled.’

If you’ve been redirected to this page from the sign in page, it means that access to your Google Account has been disabled.

In most cases, accounts are disabled because of a perceived violation of either the Google Terms of Service or product-specific Terms of Service.

Google reserves the right to:

• Suspend a Google Account from using a particular product or the entire Google Accounts system if the Terms of Service or product-specific policies are violated.

• Terminate your account at any time, for any reason, with or without notice.

If your Google Account has been disabled, please review the relevant Terms of Service before attempting to create another account. For guidelines on a specific Google product, please visit the product homepage for a link to its Terms of Service.

If you believe your account was disabled in error, contact us.

Did you see that bold bullet point? They can delete your account at any time, for any reason, without notice. Emphasis added. What’s your recourse then?

This happened on 4-5 accounts. Fortunately it did not happen on my primary account.

I clicked on the “?” link and then the “disabled in error” link. I received a message back asking me to prove I owned the account using the “Can’t access your account?” link.

After asking for an alternate email address, they begin asking questions:

Describe the problem you’re experiencing:

• I am unable to reset my password
• I believe someone has taken over my account
• Other

You can check the “Other” box but it doesn’t give you any room to say “My account was disabled without any notice or reason given.”

You are essentially trying to prove that you own the account, as if you had forgotten the password.

“Do you use Gmail with this account?” (Well, yeah)

“Do you use orkut with this Google Account?” (What? No)

“Do you use Blogger with this Google Account?” (NO)

“Google products you used with this account and the date you started using each one” (N/A)

“Account creation date” (Who the hell remembers?)

“Last successful login date” (How should I know?)

“Last password you remember” (That one I could answer, because it was stored in Mac OS X’s Keychain)

“Please note that we need your IP address in order to resolve this issue. Your IP address will be captured automatically when you submit this form.” (This is meaningless, because I have a dynamic IP. Most of the internet is on a dynamic IP. Static IPs are rare.)

(n.b. I didn’t remember when I had last logged in because I didn’t log in very often. Some of these accounts very rarely get any email. I wasn’t checking them manually, because I use Mailplane.app automatically logging in for me. If I didn’t see any login error or unread messages, I assumed that it was working fine. Unfortunately Mailplane has not done checking for “disabled” accounts. I have contacted the developer and he has added the necessary checking to the latest beta, so Mailplane will alert you if your account is disabled, as shown here:)

This will be available in the next version of Mailplane

I did the best I could to guess at the answers, and then I waited.

Here is the first email response I received:

Thank you for your report. We’ve completed our investigation and cannot return your account at this time. We were unable to verify that you own this account based on the information you provided.

If you can provide additional information to verify that you own this account, please visit http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/request.py?ara=1 and submit another report. Whether we can return access to this account depends on the strength and accuracy of your responses, so be sure to provide as much information as possible. If you’re unsure about specific dates or information, provide your best guess.

To create a new account, please visit https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount

We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your cooperation and understanding.

Regards, The Google Team

I had purchased a “.com” domain and registered the accompanying “@gmail.com” email address to use with it.

What nefarious purpose had the account been used for? Receiving notifications of blog comments which had been posted to it. As far as I know I hadn’t even sent a single email from it, so I certainly wasn’t a spammer.

I emailed them again and received this response:

This account has been disabled and we’re unable to return it.

The email then copied the “Terms of Service” text above it.

At this point I was beyond angry. There was no justification for suspending the account, but they held the strings. What if it had been my main email address that I’ve been using for 5+ years?

I contacted them again, giving them as much information as I could scrape together, and then I waited.

A few days later, the account was restored.

Be Prepared

I have since gotten smarter. Every time I setup a new Gmail account, I set it to forward all messages to another account. Go to Forwarding and POP/IMAP settings, and tell it to forward a copy of all your incoming mail to a non-Gmail account.

I maintain an account at Dreamhost specifically for this purpose.

If an account is suspended, I can go in and identify when emails stopped arriving. It also gives me access to what might otherwise be lost information.

Last but not least: when you create a new Gmail account, Google sends you a “Verification code” to the “alternate email” address that you provide when you sign up. The message looks like this:

Yes, Gmail is warning me that this message from Gmail might be phishing, despite that it is “signed by” Gmail. Which tells you what a bunch of hogwash “email signing” is.

Save that email (or at the very least, the code and the name of the account it goes with) somewhere other than in Gmail. I suggest Yojimbo or Evernote or in a textfile in your Dropbox.

The first time it happened I was able to piece together enough information that they enabled the account, but it seemed unlikely for awhile. Since then it has been smoother, I believe due in no small part because I have the information that they want.

But why?

Good luck getting any answer out of Gmail as to why your account was suspended.

I’ve also never been told “You have too many Gmail accounts.” In fact, whenever one of these accounts was suspended I used my main Gmail account as the “emergency contact” address.

I was not told “We believe that your account was compromised. You should pick a better password.”

Here is what I was told:

We apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced. The issue you described should now be resolved.

One of the emails continued:

If you are still having trouble accessing your account and you still have access to the email address you used to create your account, please reset your password by visiting https://www.google.com/accounts/ForgotPasswd. If you aren’t receiving the password-assistance email, please check your inbox for an email from accounts-noreply@google.com.

If you don’t have access to the primary email address on the account or have forgotten the answer to your security question, please fill out the form at http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/request.py?ara=1

What Now?

I’ve decided that the only safe bet is to give up my @Gmail address. I’m not suggesting that everyone should do the same, but I have lost trust that Gmail won’t just one day decide to disable my main email address. They reserve the right. I have no recourse. It’s a free service, they can do whatever they want. It’s not like I could sue them. The most I could do would be to sit there with hat in hand and say “Please, sir, give me my email address back…”

So what did I do?

I registered a new domain name (no, not this one, for reasons I won’t bother to explain here). I picked one that I could easily remember, and went with a “.net” instead of a “.com” because they are a lot easier to find. Then I signed up for Google Apps Standard Edition.

Don’t feel cheated. There’s a very important difference here.

The domain is under my control. If Google decided to shut it down or interfere with it in any way, I can immediately switch the email hosting back to Dreamhost and have my email restored in a matter of minutes or hours (not days).

I did the exact same Forwarding and POP/IMAP trick when I setup my Google Apps account, forwarding to a Dreamhost email account.

That gives me a full archive/backup of my email separate from what Google has.

I’m hopeful that Google will be less capricious about randomly suspending non-@gmail accounts, but it’s less of an issue because I can use “aliases” (what Google refers to as ‘nicknames’) in my Google Apps account. For example I could have: flickr@example.net, twitter@example.net, tumblr@example.net, ebay@example.net, paypal@example.net, amazon@example.net, and a whole bunch of others, and they would all deliver to the same mailbox.

If I need/want that “true separation” (which is why I created separate Gmail accounts in the first place) I’ve got 50 users for free. Assuming each of them has 30 aliases available I could conceivably have the equivalent of 1,500 email addresses.

Actually, it’s more than that. You can create a “catch-all” which will accept any email sent to any address at your domain. Now anyone who knows email will tell you that’s almost asking for spam, but setting up one user (anybody@example.net) and setting it as a catch-all will let you do something like what Other Inbox is good for: a throwaway email address that you can make specific to any website.

Scenario: You’re at “SomeReallyLameWebSite.com” and they demand an email to download something, or insist that you create an account. Give them “SomeReallyLameWebSite@example.net”. Get what you need, and then create a filter to delete any messages sent to that address.

n.b. Someone is bound to say “Well you could just use ‘myrealname+foo@gmail.com’ to do that!” Except that there are a lot of sites, a lot of sites, which will not accept a “+” on the left-hand side of an email address, claiming it is “invalid”. Plus, all any spam harvester would have to do is take a list of all the emails they have and strip off everything from the + to the @ to get your actual email address.

The End Result

My (latest) disabled account was re-enabled one day after I contacted Google. I received the same form letter as above.

I’m giving up on “@gmail.com” but not Gmail. It’s going to be a bit of a pain for awhile as I figure out all of the places I need to change my email address. Of course I’m not deleting my main @gmail.com email address (and I’m trying to get my recently-disabled account restored). I am simply moving things over as I think of them. Fortunately I’m on so few mailing lists these days that I don’t get anywhere near the volume of email I once got–in fact, mailing list management was the reason I originally got my first Gmail account. It was strictly “throw away” content. Amazing how much has changed since then!

I don’t mean that I won’t use it for anything… for example, it seems to be tied with Google Wave and Google Voice (Google Apps users still need a Gmail account sometimes) but for everything else? My email needs to be under my control.

Doesn’t yours?