Don’t Rely To Heavily On Your Google™ Account!

** UPDATE: 24 hours later…My account is no longer disabled.. I still don’t know why it was disabled in the first place. Oh well..Time to go backup! **

Google™ has disabled my account. No notice given, and no response to my email questions (18 hours later). They don’t offer phone support.I’ve filled out a couple forms..

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?lockout=1

and

http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/request.py?hl=en&ctx=accounts_hc&contact_type=disabled

I have made the mistake on relying very heavily on my Google™ account. I’ve invited friends and family to use Gmail™ and now their accounts are disabled. Yeh, thats right..My Mom, Dad, Fiance`, Future mother-in-law and lots of friends. All emails we have sent each other are not accessible. Gmail™ is the only email account I used that I didn’t download emails to my pc.

I used Gmail™ for my personal email and loved the service. I could check email from my Pocket PC and login from anywhere without any problems and never had an email lost. I used my Gmail™ account for my primary email address with accounts I setup at tons of websites across the web. After freaking out for a couple hours and researching possible reasons why my account would be disabled, I’m stumped.

Here are the reasons I found why a Google™ account could be suspended..

From Google:

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 service or the entire Google Accounts system if the Terms of Service or product-specific policies are violated. Google also has the right to 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.

This 96 thread discussion on google™ groups just about sums it all up. Someone named Lisa™, a google™ group helper, knows everything about disabled Google™ accounts.

The trickle down effect of this is going to take hours, maybe weeks to fix. Even if my account gets restored, the possibility of never having my emails, why I haven’t thought of this before, freaks me out. Just about every site I have an account with relies on email communication. Many procedures of users reseting email accounts kinda goes like this…

Login to your account. Find the My Account link or profile link and see if they let you change your email address. Then once you go through captchas or re-entering your password to change the address .. they send a confirmation address to your OLD email address to accept the change. This is probably the most secure and safe way to do it…but - i get screwed cause I can’t even access my Gmail™ account.

After going through all this I’ve became more of a fan of OpenID.

Ok so, no access to emails. moving on…

As you may or may not have read in my last post, I’ve been working on a project to get all my domains online and generating some revenue instead of having them sit parked somewhere. Of course, I was using Google™ adSense to generate advertising revenue. I have setup 30 urls and 3 different channels for each url for tracking ad placement. Was I downloading reports? NOPE! Left all online. There wasn’t much revenue, but there was some and now I don’t have access to it. We are also using affiliate marketing to generate revenue and if this stuff isn’t resolved soon, we will move to YPN.

Ok so, no access to advertising reports. moving on…

I’ve also setup Google™ sitemaps through the webmaster tools, for most of the url’s. Sitemaps, the new standard, are a very cool tool, and I found out some good information about how Google™ views my url’s. But, didn’t download reports and will need to reenter this information later.

What else…ah, analytics.. Had Google Analytics setup on all 30+ domains we have online!

All other Google™ services are also disabled …. spreadsheets, adwords, etc..

I gotta get back to work so I’ll leave it at this for now. I hope there is some funky issue with Google and my account gets restored. All-in-all .. I’ve learned another valuable lesson, how does it go.. oh yea.. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket! oh yeh and BACKUP YOUR DATA!

[tags]google-account, gmail, angry, analytics, email-missing, email[/tags]