Bill Cavnar — Concerns about Google Mail (Gmail)
Bill Cavnar writes about his Goggle Mail (Gmail) concerns. I am posting with his permission.
To my Gmail-using and Google-loving friends
At the risk of sounding completely alarmist, I wanted to alert you to a possible risk if you are using Gmail for any kind of really important email receiving or storage. Gmail has many features which make it an outstanding tool, including good spam-filtering, searching, tagging, and conversation-threading capabilities, plus a decent amount of storage. However, one thing Gmail does not have much of is customer support. If something goes wrong, you may be left high and dry. This is not just a theoretical possibility, and it may matter a great deal more than you would suspect, as I’ll discuss below. The good news is that there are steps you can take to mitigate the consequences of a Gmail failure, which I’ll also discuss below.
I became aware of this problem a couple of months ago when I began to have difficulties with Gmail’s spam filtering. A number of legitimate incoming email messages were being tagged as spam, and so I was completely missing them unless I thought to check in the Spam folder. Supposedly Gmail has a feature that will prevent this from happening if the sender’s address is in your contact list. Unfortunately, that feature also stopped working reliably.
Irritated by this situation, I subscribed to a daily digest of Google’s own ‘Gmail Problem-Solving’ discussion group in hopes of hearing if anyone found a solution. Mind you, this is a forum populated entirely by Gmail users. Supposedly, a Gmail staffer might occasionally post something, but I’ve never seen it in two months of following the group.
After reading through many, many posts on this group I became aware of, and then alarmed, at how poorly-supported Gmail is. True, there is a semi-helpful set of help topics one can read. Also, there are a few web pages where you can report certain problems, such as a locked account (a seemingly very common problem for a certain subset of users), or worse, a hacked account (also amazingly common). But there was no guarantee of a response on any of these problem-reporting pages, and consequently there almost never was a response.
I’m positive a large fraction of the anguished cries for help one sees on this group are mainly caused by a disconnect between chair and keyboard. However, I saw altogether too many postings by apparently capable and knowledgeable users who had such problems as
* having all of their mail deleted — as in completely gone, not in the Trash, not in Spam, not tagged, not Archived, nowhere — with Google completely unresponsive when the problem was reported
* numerous problems with spam handling, with both positive and negative classification errors involving sizable numbers of messages
* having one’s account completely disabled or locked, apparently irrevocably
* numerous weird problems with the AJAX-based interface, which then caused other problems (admittedly, these are not directly Google’s fault, but are probably due to a combination of the user’s mistakes and a browser’s bugs. However, it was the unrecoverability of the consequences from these situations that disturbed me most.)
* account name collisions, that is, cases where two individuals ended up with access to each other’s accounts. This particularly seemed to happen in cases where one name had the same characters as the other, in the same order, but with an additional period somewhere (as in ‘joesmith’ vs. ‘ joe.smith’).
I have a theory about the source of some these problems, which I include as a footnote to this message. Regardless of the cause of the problems, the main purpose of my mail is to say
1. Google’s Gmail apparently has some significant problems which have affected users, sometimes drastically.
2. Google does not provide active or timely support to users who encounter these problems.
3. If you depend on Gmail, you should do something to protect yourself.
So, what to do? For myself, Gmail offers so many advantages that I am reluctant to relinquish it as my primary email service. Moreover, I have availed myself of the convenience of having hundreds of megabytes of archived mail readily available via a web browser, and I don’t want to give that up without a fight, either.
After some thought and research, I finally came up with the following measures to protect myself in case of a Gmail crisis. If you use Gmail a lot, you should consider doing something similar:
* Handling incoming messages: My main email address is bill [aht] cavnar [daht] com, which I host at my ISP’s mail service. From there, I forward all incoming mail to my Gmail address. If that Gmail account were suddenly to have some severe problem which made it unusable, I would only need to turn off the forwarding, and my incoming mail would just stop at my ISP account. I will only lose those few messages that arrived between the time of the failure, and the time I turn off forwarding.
* Handling archived messages: I set up an email client (Thunderbird, to be specific) on my main PC workstation, configured POP3 access between it and my Gmail account, and then logged in to that account. It took a few hours, but eventually Thunderbird downloaded a backup copy of every message I had archived at Gmail. I don’t have the labels and such, of course, but at least I have copies of the messages themselves, and any attachments.
Now all I have to do is log back in from Thunderbird to Gmail every few days and pick up copies of the relative handful of new messages that have arrived since my last backup copy. Note: if you do this, remember to set the POP3 option to leave the messages on the server. Otherwise, all of your archived mail will be transferred to your client, and deleted from your Gmail account!
* Handling the contact list: I also went to my Gmail contacts list, and exported a copy of it to a CSV file. Then I loaded those addresses into Thunderbird, too. I’ll have to remember to copy over any new addresses to Thunderbird, which is a pain, but at least I have a usable copy of the several hundred addresses which I do use.
Now I always have pretty up-to-date backup copy of everything in Gmail, which has relieved me of a considerable amount of anxiety.
I hope this writeup was more useful than annoying. If you depend on Gmail a lot, you really ought to do something about the problems I have mentioned.
–Bill