GMail Warning

**BritishARMY** · December 21st, 2010, 9:02 AM

Hi all,

I have a few GMail accounts as I get various emails from all sorts of places. One account I use for allsorts, such as joining forums and the like. I then forward the emails to my main account. Anyway, I stopped getting emails that were forwarded which I realised the other day, and I just noticed it again now, so I logged in and it redirected me to a page saying my account was disabled. Odd. It really sucks because there's some important stuff on it. It has made me realise though that they can cut access to any account at any time... if they cut my main account I'd be screwed.

So just a warning, be careful with free email hosts. I thought I'd be safe with Google, but no. I've requested they look into it, maybe it was a mistake but it is causing me hassle.

**benitez17** · December 21st, 2010, 9:40 AM

That's too bad. Did they give you any reason for disabling the account?

This can happen at any free mail host, not just Google, which is why I route my important mail to a domain and host that I control. Your warning is a good one for people who rely on free providers for critical services to keep in mind.

**BritishARMY** · December 21st, 2010, 10:05 AM

No specific reason, it just said that I may have violated their Terms and Conditions, but I don't believe I have. I don't send emails from that account, only receive. I read around and people has issues like this when Google's software thinks the account has been compromised - I have recently moved house and of course this means I access the web with a different IP (and it's dynamic so it keeps changing). I thought that might be the reason but my other account is fine.

I think it's certainly a good idea to do what you said which I will do in the future.

**grynge** · December 21st, 2010, 10:09 AM

I learnt many a year ago that if you have anything that is crucial to your continuing making money you should always have a backup. I lost several thousand quotes to a harddrive failure. Since then I have used raid and back up drives for all our computers. Same with all our emails, I have probably 30terabyte of backups and backups. If your emails are critical you shouldn't rely on letting someone else control access to them.

I used to use gmail to sort my spam until they had a failure with their pop3 server and of course I had important customer emails to be sent and received. Now I do all my own spam and have never looked back. A backup server for email. Thunderbird these days I think is as good as gmail and even better I automatically split my incoming emails into folders as they arrive. Business ones can be dealt with straight away other less important ones can wait in a folder until I get some personal time to look at them.

**BritishARMY** · December 22nd, 2010, 3:22 AM

They undisabled it. Just checked my inbox on my other account and they replied in less than 24 hours. Nice one. Still unsure why it was disabled but at least it's back. Also a good lesson learnt, don't use it for really important stuff. Once I've got a bit of money I'll buy/rent a server and get a domain specifically for emails.

**benitez17** · December 22nd, 2010, 6:47 AM

Originally Posted by BritishARMY

They undisabled it. Just checked my inbox on my other account and they replied in less than 24 hours. Nice one. Still unsure why it was disabled but at least it's back. Also a good lesson learnt, don't use it for really important stuff. Once I've got a bit of money I'll buy/rent a server and get a domain specifically for emails.

You don't need a whole server. You can just use a shared account.

**grynge** · December 22nd, 2010, 9:08 AM

Originally Posted by BritishARMY

Once I've got a bit of money I'll buy/rent a server and get a domain specifically for emails.

If you have cpanel hosting you can run your own email server for that domain.

**Clinton** · January 21st, 2011, 11:41 AM

The advantage with using something like gmail is the good spam control and many are addicted to that. Maybe the best course is to have an email address at your own domain and forward all that email through a gmail account for filtering and then back to your domain. Is that even possible?

**Andy** · January 21st, 2011, 11:54 AM

Originally Posted by Clinton

The advantage with using something like gmail is the good spam control and many are addicted to that. Maybe the best course is to have an email address at your own domain and forward all that email through a gmail account for filtering and then back to your domain. Is that even possible?

I never tried sending it back to my domain but I use email addresses from my own domains a lot and forward it all to a "free" account. (Does ANYbody else pay for yahoo?). If something important gets dumped by the freemail, I've got a backup.

Andy

**grynge** · January 21st, 2011, 6:58 PM

Originally Posted by Clinton

The advantage with using something like gmail is the good spam control and many are addicted to that. Maybe the best course is to have an email address at your own domain and forward all that email through a gmail account for filtering and then back to your domain. Is that even possible?

Yes you can get Gmail to pick up all your emails, then it will spam filter them, then you can collect those emails from google via your email program (thunderbird/outlook/oe) The only problem with this is if their pop/imap server goes down which it has in the past and the second major problem is if you use gmail server to send your emails (for their conversation thread management) then you will encounter problems with other peoples spam filters. Saying stuff like we don't beleive this email is from this source etc etc or just dumping it in the spam folder a major problem if you are in business.