GMail Snafu Redux
Longtime readers may recall the snafu that caused me to lose my GMail account and 100Mb of personal email that was stored there about a year ago.
For those who don’t, here’s a quick recap:
Being a typical early adopter, I had a GMail account before most folks had even heard of GMail. In the sign-up process, I wanted my username to be my name; but with a common name like Jeff Davis, that was impossible. I went through every possible variation of my first name, last name, etc. with no luck.
And then I hit on jl.davis which was my first two initials, separated from my last name by a dot, and that magic incantation was accepted and I became a happy GMail user.
(A very important part of this story is that the username “jldavis” with no dot separator was not available – so we are left to assume there must have already been a user with that name.)
Fast-forward a few years and one day I received an email from the folks at Google telling me the “good news” about my GMail account – that now any dot variation on my username would work. In other words, if my username was ‘jeffdavis’, then mail sent to je.ffdavis or any such variation would be routed to me.
I have no clue why that would be considered a “feature”, but that was the news from Google.
At once I assumed this would be a problem since I already had a dot in my username, and sure enough, it was.
The next day I couldn’t log into my account. I received the error message that my username and password didn’t match and nothing I tried (like the password recovery routine) would work. I can only assume that by linking my account with another user, I would had to have cracked his password to gain access to the recovery process.
Emails and calls to Google were dead ends as the reply I received said simply that GMail was a free “beta” service and as such, there was no support available to deal with user problems. They cheerily suggested I open another account with a new username – after all, the service was free!
My solution was to purchase email service from Microsoft. By paying $20 a year I get more storage and no adverts in my email but more importantly, I get access to human service if there is ever a problem.
I’m regurgitating this old story because I just read about someone who very recently had nearly the same experience with GMail and it should serve as a warning bell to all.
I like Google. I like their search engine and all the cool tools they develop and make freely available to us all.
Heck, I even love GMail (yes, I got another account) but I will never be able to trust it for important emails again.
For that, I had to turn to Microsoft. Make of that what you will.
Adding dots is a feature in that you can create permutations of your email address. ie, if you’re using your email address to sign up for something that seems spammy, use u.s.e.r.n.a.m.e@gmail.com, then set up a filter in gmail for everything sent to that address to be deleted, or moved to a different folder, or whatever. It also works with +anything. Thus I could use username+blogcomments@gmail.com to get updates to posts I comment on. (I don’t, but that’s the idea behind it.)
Kenneth Finnegan, W6KWF
5 Oct 08 at 11:30 am
i auto forward ALL emails to another account off my main gmail account. once i have them in another gmail account i autofoward that to my .mac account.
cant trust gmail for everything but it is easy to use…
johnny
5 Oct 08 at 2:10 pm
The question is: who do you trust to keep your important information in some server that you don’t control? We seem to get sucked into clever little online services that are very convenient and useful. And they seem like such nice people….google even promises that they will do no evil. How could we go wrong? Because you can lose all the data at a moments notice and they’ll just remind you of the EULA. See what Richard Stallman (GNU fame) says: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.computing.richard.stallman
Don’t trust the cloud. Remember, even paranoid people can lose their email account
73, Bob K0NR
Bob K0NR
5 Oct 08 at 9:07 pm
What makes you think Microsoft is more trustworthy for email? Look at what a mess they made out of Hotmail. Just because you are paying them doesn’t mean that they will do the right thing. Check your service agreement, there will be a disclaimer of liability and no guarantees of data or service availability.
All of these online services have risks. If the data is important to you, back it up.
To that end, at least gmail has _free_ pop/imap access and message forwarding. Many other services charge for these features.
-Chris KC2SYK
Chris
6 Oct 08 at 11:10 am
“What makes you think Microsoft is more trustworthy for email?”
I wouldn’t argue that Microsoft is the very best email provider available; but the fact that there is a phone number with a human on the other end makes them head and shoulders above the free “beta” service when things go south.
The loss of data could have been averted with backups, no doubt about it. But the fact that my email was transferred to someone else meant that a complete stranger could access all my email — not to mention that I could no longer use it.
The problem was **WAY** bigger than just not backing up 100Mb of email.
Give Google a call sometime and tell them you have a problem with your GMail account and see how satisfying an answer you get.
Been there and done that…
Jeff, KE9V
6 Oct 08 at 11:15 am
Yes, this was a design flaw on Google’s part, and should never have been an issue to begin with. They screwed up.
However, I wouldn’t trust MS with my email. They do anti-competitive things, like block emails from rival providers (both yahoo and gmail have been targets in the past).
Since you have a tech interest, you might want to consider running your own email server on your own domain. That way you don’t have to trust any third party. If you don’t have a static IP at home, another option is VPS hosting, which is relatively inexpensive (cheaper than colo).
Cheers.
-Chris KC2SYK
Chris
8 Oct 08 at 11:01 am