A while back, I tried to log into my Gmail account to check my mail, and I got the above message informing me that my account had been locked out due to “unusual usage”. No other explanation was offered, and no method to get the account unlocked was provided other than to send an email to the address shown above, which was almost certain to result in a canned response.

Despite the futility of doing so, I sent an email, and sure enough, got the following response:

Hello,

Thanks for your report. We apologize for any inconvenience you may have
experienced. For your security, we have temporarily disabled access to
your account because our system detected abnormal usage.

Abnormal usage includes, but is not limited to:

- Receiving, deleting, or popping out large amounts of mail in a short
period of time
- Sending mail to a large number of recipients in a short period of time
- Using 3rd party file-sharing or storing software in your account
- Logging in from multiple locations in a short period of time
- Using your account for purposes other than email

Please note that it may be necessary to clear your browser’s cache and
cookies.

To clear your cache and cookies in Internet Explorer, please follow these
steps:

[---instructions snipped---]

We appreciate your patience while we work to protect the security of Gmail
users.

Sincerely,

The Gmail Team

Which, of course, gave me no real explanation of what I’d done wrong so I could avoid doing it in the future. Some digging turned up that other people have had this problem, and it seems that it may be related to viewing long threads of messages at once. Said digging also seemed to indicate that getting any info from Google about what went wrong is next to impossible, and that in some cases they seemed to take an offended tone (how dare you challenge us! We’re Google!) if people actually managed to get through to somebody with a pulse.

I meant to make a post about this when it happened, but my service had been unlocked by the next morning, I moved on to other things, and it kind of dropped off the radar. A couple things have happened since then. First off, another friend of mine had some trouble with her account (I guess she was unable to send email) and of course got no real response from Google until it just started working again a few days later. Second, it’s come to light that your email may not be going just to you.

Now this is not a panicky “Google is Evil” post, or anything like that. Google provides some great services, and I use them all the time, even though I’m pretty sure it’s going to eventually turn into Skynet and send Austrian bodybuilder/governor/cyborgs to kill us all. But I think we should probably realize that Google is no longer the amiable, slightly nerdy company that they started out as, and have headed pretty far down the road to faceless corporation-dom. It’s probably wise to view their service with a bit of skepticism, and to question their motives a bit.

Mostly, though, this is just a reminder not to put too much stock into free services, even on the internet. You really do get what you pay for sometimes, and it’s important to remember that free services, whether they be from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft or whoever, are not beholden to you in any fashion. If they lose your email, lock you out of your account, or decide to send all of your personal correspondence to Nigerian spammers, you’re pretty much SOL.

For myself, I’ve since pulled all of my mail archives out of Gmail (using their POP server) and stored them on my local machine. I’m still using Gmail, but for the most part everything really important goes through another account, hosted on this domain. I have to pay a monthly fee for it, but sometimes that’s worth it.