Is GMail safe?

posted by admin on June 1, 2011

It’s only been a week now since I don’t have access to my primary gmail account I use for all purposes – my family, friends, colleagues, employers, organizations – all will now receive a delay in message delivery notice every time they send me an email. So how did this happen? honestly, I don’t know and I think even the guys at Google are also not capable enough? or probably they don’t care enough to figure this problem out.

So here is what happened on that fateful day – like everyday I woke up and started working on my beloved mac with a strong cup of black – surfed through some job sites, some tech and gizmo news and a bit of reading – sometimes I can get a bit over organized so I do have a couple mail accounts with gmail and yahoo – I like to keep my serious emails and fun emails separate; For some reason I was a bit annoyed shifting through my endless list of tabs in Firefox and to refresh my inbox pages every 10mins to see if the jobs I applied for have actually got me registered, so I decided to use the in-built Mail app that comes with Mac OS X. So I configure my POP3 gmail access and start to synchronize – oh blimey! I have been having this account since 2004 so that’s a lot of email – patient I was and started to download all the messages – whilst this is happening I received a pop on my Nexus S of new email – now this was some email I was eagerly awaiting for – didn’t want to disturb the messages being downloaded to Mail app so I decided to refresh the web page which was still open – The page starts with “Loading…” and goes to “Still working…” after a few seconds and bam goes my account into maintenance mode – I get the following error –

We are currently working on your account because an error occurred with your mail storage. Your account data and messages are safe. However, you won’t be able to log in until our team is finished.

We can’t predict exactly how long this will take, but if you are still unable to access your account in 48 hours, please contact us with your username at gmail-maintenance@google.com . We apologize for the disruption.

Seeing this message got me worried but I calmed down soon because it was already noon on a Friday and 48hrs wouldn’t harm me as I should have my account back positively by noon Sunday – I would have panicked if it said 48 business hours – but it didn’t so I was OK. Just to be safe I wrote to gmail maintenance team above and explained my problem. Now you see at this point I still trust Google cause it’s been serving us with this fast and free email service for more than a decade – right??

Time is 2300hrs on a Monday and I still don’t have access to my email – Ironically, I googled for some solutions – I ended up in a Google forum where another disappointed user is screaming his brains out – apparently his primary email used for his business is going through same problems – and he is a paying user for this service – I piled on that forum desperately hoping that some Google employee (gmail dev if we are lucky) would notice that – some gentleman who has access to some Google private forums agreed to help us by posting the problem there – still no luck

When I woke up Tuesday morning to find out nothing progressed I went to work – I listed out my immediate and important tasks at hand and started working from my new gmail account but I still need access to those emails – 6 years of conversations and contacts!!!

Adding to this – a month ago I decided that it was time to put some trust into the “Cloud” – somehow I convinced myself that it is safe and secure to store your contacts, photos, messages in the cloud – especially the Google cloud – so I bought myself a Google phone – Nexus S. I was impressed when all my contacts were synced in a jiffy when I setup my gmail account – armed with android 2.3.4 I even had gtalk with video and I was happily chatting away with friends and family. Little did I know that like all happy things that must come to an end this will too! well it came a bit too early

It’s day 7 and I still don’t have access – my phone keeps annoying me with messages that it cannot authenticate my account – am frustrated and angry at myself for trusting this behemoth internet company that can’t even fix a simple mail problem – 6 years of contacts, messages and attachments all at the pity of Google. Shame on me!!

The question is what if this happens to other “trusted” Google services? Google Voice, Google Storage, Picasa, YouTube? – can we afford it? Google just announced Google Wallet, Google Music and Google Offers – can we rely on those services? they all run on the same Google backbone right? – I don’t see any of these services going down entirely (that’s my hope) but I can foresee an immediate nightmare if it happens to your account; it happened to me so you could be a victim too! – cause from the looks of it and my first hand experience, if this ever happens then there is no support from Google whatsoever – let me emphasize – no support – sans support – nada – ziltch

So peeps this could happen to you – backup your emails and contacts as often as possible and save yourself a “gEmbarrasment” or a “gNightmare”