If you look at the top of that linked article you’ll note it’s been updated since it was first written. I seem to remember it reading differently when I first posted this, but I can’t be positive since it’s now been over 5 months ago. I’m afraid I’ve slept since then.

At any rate, my primary frustration with Gmail was that I had been arbitrarily locked out of my email archives, and the insinuation from their responses that the problem must be on my end. The post was mostly a warning against letting too much of your data get locked up in free online services, because they don’t owe you a thing. Which is still quite a valid warning, I think.

As a follow-up, while I’m writing, I haven’t seen this problem since then, so who knows what happened. I’ve started using Gmail for some stuff again, but I’m now using their POP3 server to pull my mail down to my local machine every day or two. So at the worst if this happens again I’ll only lose access to a day or so worth of mail. BTW, kudos to Google for providing a real POP/SMTP interface to their free mail service. That’s miles ahead of services like Hotmail where you have to pay to get your email out of the system, or use third-party hacks…