The perils of having free e-mail … with Google
Please note my new e-mail account: miguel@exposurecompensation.com
The gmail account I used for this blog has been deactivated without reason or warning by Google. If you have been trying to contact me in the last 1-2 weeks, my apologies if you did not get a response from me. If you can, please send the e-mail again. To know more about what happened, please read below.
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Yes, it is possible to make lots of money giving away products for free. Indeed, we have become accustomed to the fact that many of the services we use MUST be free, and e-mail services are a genuine example of that. But with free lunches, we can get in trouble …
In 2007 about 180 billion of e-mails were set every day, or about 2 million every second. Of these about 70% were spam e-mails, and genuine e-mails were sent but just 20-25% of the world population. Doing the math, one can easily understand that companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, with their extremely popular FREE e-mails services, will experience lots of abuse by spammers, hackers and unreasonable users. Their reaction: fight it, hard. Understandable. The problem is that in any fight there are colateral casualties, and I have become one of them.
Few days ago, I found that my gmail account [exposurecompensation@gmail.com] has been deactivated. No questions asked, no reasons explained. Indeed, zero has been the information that Google provided, and null has been the response to my multiple e-mails asking about the situation. Searching the web, I found out some posts from Google technicians explaining that in attempts to fight a new network of spamers they had to deactivate a large number of e-mail accounts and they expected many regular e-mails would be affected as collateral damage. Mine was one of them.
This is quite annoying and I have to send my apologies if any of you tried to contact me, and my excuses if I have difficult to follow up some previous e-mails because I lost many of them.
From now on, I don’t use free e-mail services any longer. I will pay for them. At least I will have the chance to get customer service if anything goes bad. Getting the e-mail deactivated without warning does not make it in my book. The perils of having free e-mail … with Google.
How about creating two Gmail accounts, treating one of them as a back-up and forwarding its contents to the other, user one? Only one’s replies would be missing, if the primary went dead and one had to revert to the back-up.
man I put all my email through google! I hadn’t heard anything about this.
If you use a mac, I highly recommend a .mac account. I have nearly 10 different email address and my .mac address is the only one WITHOUT a spam problem. Plus the added benefits of storage, syncing, and backup make it well worth the $100 a year.
wow, this is scary. i too use Gmail. Due to spam, I autoforward mail from my domain to the Google account. So this adds to the fear. Maybe i get shut down too?
but maybe no email is a blessing? but that’s another conversation altogether.
I too have DotMac, but it’s been problematic.
The great thing about Google Mail, you can be at any computer, anywhere, and the Mail is the same, unlike the jumping thru hoops to Sync your DotMac mail. You’d think apple would be better, but I’ve not found that.
One other note: the FILTERS for spam, within Google Mail is FAR INFERIOR to those controls found in Apple Mail. The google filters are borderline useless. Very basic. The weird thing: why not make the spam filters in google mail more effective, and put power into the hands of the Users, to keep their spam auto deleted? It does not make sense.
Shocked that there aren’t much more severe penalties for spammers, due to the havoc they inflict. “Off with the hands” would be my punishment for guilty spammers. That would sure as hell have an impact as the word spread.
Thanks much for the comments.
The two e-mail accounts is a good idea as a backup, or perhaps even two e-mails at different locations (e.g. gmail and yahoo) could be better. Still, the most annoying part is that the e-mail address could be cancelled and in itself it is very inconvenient … to notify everybody about the new e-mail … it is like when you loose the telephone number.
Ian, if you have all the e-mail at gmail, perhaps will always work well for you, but just make sure you have the information somewhere else as Stupid Photographer suggested.
I use .mac for my private e-mail … I agree it has been working very well indeed …
I thought about using a new .mac e-mail address for this blog, but then I decided to use the e-mail at the domain exposurecompensation.com for one main reason: I can move this e-mail any time anywhere as long as I own the domain. So it will not be linked to an e-mail provider company … it is now mine …
Thanks again,
Miguel
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