I think what's even more horrifying that isn't mentioned in the article is how many services use email as a form of user authentication.
If you lose access to your gmail account, you also lose access to changing your password on any service that makes you do so through an email link - I know of some services that don't even let you change your account email without clicking on an email authentication link.
So not only is there the always-lingering possibility of losing your google account to automated shutdowns, you can also lose access to services that you use that use authentication through email, quite an uneasy thought.
Unfortunately though, it's poor practice to let a user change their email address without first sending a confirmation email. If you don't confirm the action before making the change then bad people can lock out the true owner of an account simply by being logged-in.
You can always point your MX records at another server, if you have your own domain + gmail. Still sucks (and doesn't serve everybody), but it's an option if the worst happens to your account.
I make it a point to have my emails on my own domain. I use Google Apps and then use my own IMAP backup app (http://thehorcrux.com/). In case something goes wrong, I intend to move providers and restore the emails back.
There are also a few command line tools like http://gmvault.org/ if you love tinkering.
The most interesting part was the reason he believes the account was suspended. He was working on a spreadsheet containing usernames and passwords. If that's really the case, it means some automated system scans not only your email, but documents you work on, for things like password lists, and right away assumes you're up to no good, killing your account. Scary.
Definitely a reason I have always paid for Gmail/Drive before it was that. But the actual reason is quite scary why it triggered the issue:
"My data was intact save for the last thing I’d worked on–a spreadsheet containing a client’s account numbers and passwords. It seems that Google’s engineers determined this single document violated policy and locked down my entire account. My request to get that document back is still pending."
So you can't keep files you need to secure in Drive? Blown away by this. And the access to the entire ecosystem based on one document. This is not good. With that logic if there is a DCMA request or problem with a video on youtube the whole site should just shut down.
If this file is indeed the cause of the account closure... what happens if you're using a Chromebook? Then not only do you loose access to that computer, you are restricted to what kind of content you can create and store on your computer.
I'm more appalled that he's storing his client's account passwords in a spreadsheet. It's ridiculously easy to accidentally share the wrong doc with the wrong people.
It seems extremely unlikely that you could determine the problem from "the last thing I'd worked on", and it seems even more unlikely that a spreadsheet with (barring any additional information from this story) account numbers and passwords would auto-trigger a shutdown: there would be so many false positives that most people would have had their accounts closed by now.
It would be nice if Google, when they threw you out, let you download a glob of your data. That would make the thing a lot less painful for most people.
> Google told me for the first time that it reserves the right to “terminate your account at any time, for any reason, with or without notice.”
No one reads the ToS / AUP, but this shows why it's a problem. It was not the first time Google told this guy; he was told in the legal documents that he agreed to when he signed up.
Yes, Douglas Adams had it right.
> "But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months."
> "Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything."
> "But the plans were on display ..."
> "On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
> "That's the display department."
> "With a flashlight."
> "Ah, well the lights had probably gone."
> "So had the stairs."
> "But look, you found the notice didn't you?"
> "Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."
It seems strange that Google wouldn't have a policy of issuing warnings, escalating warnings, etc., before taking the drastic action of suspending an account. Without knowing the exact reason this person's account was suspended, for all we know it could be a complete glitch.
For an individuals it's overkill buy at work we use something like this :
* We use Google/Gmail only for mail hosting, not for calender or cloud storage.
* Google apps with our domain.
* We have also an account at Yandex.
* DNS service from DynDNS, MX ttls set to 3600 seconds (1 hour, it could be less)
* For virtualization, we have a i7 machine with 2x1 TB disks (Raid-1).
* For webmail, calender, sharing etc we use Zimbra ( open source version ).
* Everyone has an internal email ( [email protected] ) and external gmail account. Zimbra syncs itself with gmail.
* When somebody sends email , depending user, zimbra send it using gmail or relay.
* At 3 a.m. system automatically shut down Zimbra , takes backup on usb 3 hdd (~100Gb, arround 40 mins) and brings up it again( I know, there is a room for improvement, like rsyncing /opt/zimbra directory ). We change usb disks everyday or two and store other disk at somewhere outside the office.
So,
- If Gmail "dumps" us, we can change our MX to Yandex, stuggle couple hours and then continue to work.
- If local server burns, users can continue to work using Gmail while we build & install new one.
We tried rackspace email hosting but it had problems ( some mails doesn't delivered, some incoming mails lost etc ). Fastmail was/is expensive comparing current infrastructure and it could be viable if we have more than 30 persons.
P.S. : I'm not saying this solution is perfect or it's the only way to do, i'm just sharing.
When G+ was announced I realised the implications were I to do anything on the social side that risked the account... loss of access to email, calendar, documents, etc that go back more than a decade.
I made a choice that day and I still stick to it:
I split my Google identity.
My original Gmail account is still in use and I use that for anything social, for any settings and preferences... i.e. the non-essential stuff: Google+, Chrome Sync, Android Play Store, and Google Currents.
A Google Apps account deals with anything that I care to keep and is on my private domain: Gmail, Calendar, Contacts, and Drive.
I then used sync control in Android to turn off everything that each account won't use. And in Manage Domain on the Google Apps I disabled G+ and anything social.
For me it's a risk limitation exercise.
Should Google lock my Gmail, I lose things I don't care about. I keep backups (Gmail offline + Grive) of my Google Apps domain, and should that get locked I can change the DNS, setup my own email and restore the backup via IMAP.
I get to benefit from Google services without a large exposure to risk should something happen.
I think we need a paid email provider, someone who's sole business is to provide email services, and maybe a calendar. Someone who you can host your own domain with and someone who's mission it is to ensure their customers have privacy, security and can rely on their services. Someone who doesn't just guarantee their services for as much as you pay for them but someone who is willing to put their ass on the line to prove that they're a good provider.
Sure, you could just set up your own email server but why go through the hassle? There's a real opportunity here, my mother doesn't know how to set up her own email provider, neither does my aunt. A good email provider will make it really easy to do everything related to email with advanced spam filtering capabilities and will run a very tight ship.
Actually, getting a paid email account is easy. Just about every hosting provider out there also offers an email address.
Web access is usually terrible though. If you're lucky, they provide roundcube, which is ok, but certainly inferior to Gmail. If you use IMAP and some desktop client, this might not be a problem.
The hard part is the calendar and contacts. I don't know of any CalDAV or CardDav provider. Your best bet is probably some hosted Exchange solution, which provides ActiveSync.
Kinda sucks that Google makes type 1 errors occasionally. OTOH, you keep sensitive data from your users in your personal gmail account and you're not paying for support? You crazy.
Seriously, why does ANYONE use anything other than Google Search and Analytics? Why do you willfully choose to expose yourself and your business to what they can do to you? From the article:
"A few minutes into my Google-less existence, I realized how dependent I had become. I couldn’t finish my work or my taxes, because my notes and expenses were stored in Google Drive, and I didn’t know what else I should work on because my Google calendar had disappeared. I couldn’t publicly gripe about what I was going through, because my Blogger no longer existed. My Picasa albums were gone. I’d lost my contacts and calling plan through Google Voice; otherwise I would have called friends to cry."
And that list of losses can be expanded if you use other Google tools.
Personally, I just don't get it. I was using various forms of email before Google even existed. I settled on Outlook and self-hosted email on Linux a long time ago. Oh yes, MS Office for docs, calendars, etc.. Perfect? Nope. But nobody can flip a switch and take it all away overnight.
I simply could not fathom running any of my businesses with this kind of daily risk. Any one of your employees could trigger a Google account shutdown and cost you dearly.
What's the problem here? Are MS license fees too expensive when compared to loosing all of your data overnight?
As for the other non-MS Office services offered by Google, well, there are tons of alternatives, free and paid.
I was lucky enough to learn this lesson about three years ago when a client's account was shut down merely for moving about two hundred domains to a an "AdSense for Domains" service they used to offer. Bam! Three days later their entire account is shutdown, AdWords, AdSense, Gmail, Docs, everything. Wow. New user too.
From that point forward I made a few decisions I have yet to violate:
- Use Google Search if you must
- Use Google Analytics if you must
- Use Google AdWords if you must
- Do not base a business on Google AdSense.
Your entire revenue stream could evaporate overnight.
- Do NOT use ANY OTHER Google service, no matter how enticing or
convenient it might be. Consider what the cost to your business
might be if that new sparkling offering on the table
is pulled away without notice or recourse.
- Do not build a business on a foundation someone else has full control over.
So far, so good. Email, documents, backups and collaboration existed just fine before Google was even an idea in someone's head. Don't be lured into something that can kill your business and cause you personal financial damage.
If I were running an investment firm I would have a clause in my contracts requiring that no business-critical services are to be hosted by Google on any companies we'd invest on. Talk about playing with fire. Invest millions into a venture and Google pulls their data backbone from right under them? Crap! Screw that.
This reminds of a story I've read about (big) companies and electricity: At the start of the 20th century it was typical for companies to produce their own electricity. The concerns where basically the same as they are now with Internet services: Your business depends on another company; what will you do if they close down? Or throw you out? And what about the transmission - I've heard the net is not stable? and so on. So, what did change? Trust. Electric companies invested heavily in various areas:
- Reliability. The electric transmission net was shit at this time. Blackouts each week, sometimes each day were typical
- Cross-transmission i.e. a shared transmission net instead of one net per provider, so you could switch without much hassle if your provider failed you
- Better contracts to guarantee that you will get your electricity and that a company cannot dump you without notice
All of this parts worked together to convince companies that electricity was no longer something you had to do yourself, but something that could be provided by someone else.
As far as I can tell Google tries to be the outsourcing address for various (all?) net related services which have been done "in house" in the past. The problem seems to be that they fail in the areas highlighted above. As long as this doesn't change many companies will be hesitant to trust Google with services they depend on. And maybe posts like the OPs (and robomartins) show that they are correct in their assessment.
Can you suggest a viable alternative to Google Mail? I'm feeling uncomfortable having all my mail in Google's hands but haven't found an alternative yet.
People use it because the products sound neat, and there's no friction, and then they keep using them because there's friction to move away.
"Free email, with 1 GB of email storage? Neat". "Nice fast web-browser, nice features? Neat!" etc etc.
People on HN do AB testing for button colours in an effort to reduce friction to the lowest possible. It's not that surprising that people think "it wont happen to me".
See also people who never make backups until they learn the lesson that first time they lose everything.
>Seriously, why does ANYONE use anything other than Google Search and Analytics? Why do you willfully choose to expose yourself and your business to what they can do to you?
A. Does anyone have a valid story were the user actually lost everything, for good?
B. Assuming it's possible the risk of catastrophic failure by losing Google can still be lower in a risk assessment than the cost of redundancy or of making each part independent. Especially in a startup where there is already risk everywhere.
This reply is becoming generic here, and has a lot of truth in it. It does ignore however Google's part in actively and quite insistently tempting users to adopt its services.
1) A hands-off, hassle-free service that connects to all your Google 'properties' and backs up everything every hour, on the hour, and allows easy importing into a selection of similar replacement services if/when the Googleplex smites me down.
My Mac app, CloudPull, closely resembles that description. It runs in the background on your Mac, backing up Gmail, Google Contacts, Google Calendar, Google Drive, and Google Reader. It performs backups every hour, and keeps snapshots for 90 days.
* Buy a Synology NAS
* Buy a domain name
* Setup a mail server on your NAS (you get Roundcube in 2 clicks)
* Forward emails from gmail to your home email
* Backup to Amazon Glacier (in a few clicks on a Synology)
Now when a problem arise, just stop using GMail and use Roundcube directly.
Probably the author would have been interested in an article which I didn't finally publish ;) ... here are some (not always good ;)) Google alternatives
Search: DuckDuckGo, Bing, Ask, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, Baidu
Scholar: TODO
Patent:TODO
Image: Bing
Shopping/price compare:
Photos (Picasa): Flickr, SmugMug
YouTube: Vimeo
News: Yahoo, TODO
Mail: Yahoo, Hotmail, Thunderbird, Fastmail
GDrive (storage): Spideroak, Dropbox,
Documents: Microsoft, Zoho, OpenOffice
Calendar: Zoho, Hotmail, AOL Calendar, 1Calendar, Outlook, Thunderbird, 30 boxes
Chrome (Browser): Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chromium with Chromatic
Google+: Facebook, Twitter, Identica, Diaspora, LinkedIn, Foursquare
Maps
routing: OSRM, Bing (=Yahoo), MapQuest, GraphHopper ;)
local search: Yelp, Bing (no API!)
mobile: TomTom
Google Streetmaps/Earth: Bing 3D
News: Netvibes (full of google search ;)), Yahoo, Twitter, breakingnews
Reader: Netvibes, liferea (Linux only)
Alerts: Netvibes
Translation: Microsoft
Analytics: Piwik
AdWords: TODO
Google Books: nothing found!?
Google Sites: Wikispaces, Zoho
Google Talk/Hangout: skype, talkyoo
Blogs: Wordpress, tumblr
Code: GitHub, SourceForge, BitBucket
Groups: SourceForge
Checkout/Wallet: TODO
Google Apps: Amazon
Speech Recognition: Nuance
Google Voice: PhoneBooth
Google TV: Apple TV, Samsung, LG, ...
Chrome OS: it's Lubuntu!
Smartphone (Android): iPhone, Nokia, BlackBerry, Ubuntu
Play Store: Apple Store
music: spotify, itunes
Self-driving car: BMW, Audi, Volvo, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Nissan, ...
Parts of those information through lifehacker
ToDos for Google: Offline routing, Own Games, Porn, Ebay, Amazon clone
If you are an Android user, in this situation you also lose access to all the apps that you bought from Google Play. Many developers only release their software through Google's app store, and for paid apps you cannot make backup copies of the APK, at least if your device isn't rooted, which it isn't for most users. If you are an Android dev, please also make your app available through other stores.
Lost count of how many times this was mentioned, but it bears repeating still :
You don't own what you can't control. Even if your name is on it, even if you've given it to everyone, even if you use it on a million other accounts as a means of access and an identity, you don't really own it.
This is why, I still keep a contact@domain for professional work while saving all my personal stuff on Gmail locally via POP.
The nice thing about HN (or the bad thing; depends on your perspective) is that it doesn't need an email. I wish more watering holes were like that. Alas, people are flaky with passwords and need resetting from time to time.
If it was based on the content of a document in the Google Drive, it's probably an automated rule. Clearly such an automated rule is going above and beyond the minimum action by affecting the entire account rather than just the document in question. Given that characteristic, I wonder if it might also shutdown the account of anyone who the document is shared with. Could be quite dangerous if it does. Documents can be added into someone's Google Drive just by having them follow a link.
I would really, sincerely, love to reply with my opinion on this, what seems by the title at least, wonderful article. But unfortunately people do not seem to have decent enough of a hosting provider and/or server to survive the outcome of getting on the front page of HN and hence I am forced to see "Error establishing a database connection".
Back in the old days before VPS, websites would autoscale leading to huge and unprecedented bills. For example, I hosted a website that contained download links. One day the Chinese found out and hot-linking causing my server bill to jump from $5.95 to over $200. I was 12 and this made me sad.
Google closed his Google Account including Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calender etc. without notice and without explanation. After 6 days he got it back after a google employee he knows personally escalated the case internally.
Everything was backed up. My passwords were safely stored. But it was going to take some time to get to them.
I did have my Google password, so I logged in. I was on a different computer, a different OS, a different network. I was asked to enter my Google Authenticator number, and then BAMM I got access to everything.
I realised just how scary the Google 'Save passwords' thing is.
I trust Google, and I know they have smart people working on security.
We've seen similar where someone having their Google account hacked lost access to everything.
This should be part of your back up / disaster planning. I guess there's a niche for a single page check-list of what people should be storing 'just in case'.
[+] [-] zalzane|13 years ago|reply
If you lose access to your gmail account, you also lose access to changing your password on any service that makes you do so through an email link - I know of some services that don't even let you change your account email without clicking on an email authentication link.
So not only is there the always-lingering possibility of losing your google account to automated shutdowns, you can also lose access to services that you use that use authentication through email, quite an uneasy thought.
[+] [-] coderdude|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsimpson|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] suhastech|13 years ago|reply
I make it a point to have my emails on my own domain. I use Google Apps and then use my own IMAP backup app (http://thehorcrux.com/). In case something goes wrong, I intend to move providers and restore the emails back.
There are also a few command line tools like http://gmvault.org/ if you love tinkering.
[+] [-] dendory|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ceph_|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drawkbox|13 years ago|reply
"My data was intact save for the last thing I’d worked on–a spreadsheet containing a client’s account numbers and passwords. It seems that Google’s engineers determined this single document violated policy and locked down my entire account. My request to get that document back is still pending."
So you can't keep files you need to secure in Drive? Blown away by this. And the access to the entire ecosystem based on one document. This is not good. With that logic if there is a DCMA request or problem with a video on youtube the whole site should just shut down.
[+] [-] falcolas|13 years ago|reply
I hope this gentleman is wrong. I really do.
[+] [-] badideabear|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] magicalist|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|13 years ago|reply
> Google told me for the first time that it reserves the right to “terminate your account at any time, for any reason, with or without notice.”
No one reads the ToS / AUP, but this shows why it's a problem. It was not the first time Google told this guy; he was told in the legal documents that he agreed to when he signed up.
Yes, Douglas Adams had it right.
> "But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months."
> "Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything."
> "But the plans were on display ..."
> "On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
> "That's the display department."
> "With a flashlight."
> "Ah, well the lights had probably gone."
> "So had the stairs."
> "But look, you found the notice didn't you?"
> "Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."
[+] [-] dhimes|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] betterunix|13 years ago|reply
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
[+] [-] baby|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woodchuck64|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e40|13 years ago|reply
If by strange you meant "bad", then I agree with you.
[+] [-] gscott|13 years ago|reply
(i.e that the person should have a copy of their data).
[+] [-] devmach|13 years ago|reply
* We use Google/Gmail only for mail hosting, not for calender or cloud storage.
* Google apps with our domain.
* We have also an account at Yandex.
* DNS service from DynDNS, MX ttls set to 3600 seconds (1 hour, it could be less)
* For virtualization, we have a i7 machine with 2x1 TB disks (Raid-1).
* For webmail, calender, sharing etc we use Zimbra ( open source version ).
* Everyone has an internal email ( [email protected] ) and external gmail account. Zimbra syncs itself with gmail.
* When somebody sends email , depending user, zimbra send it using gmail or relay.
* At 3 a.m. system automatically shut down Zimbra , takes backup on usb 3 hdd (~100Gb, arround 40 mins) and brings up it again( I know, there is a room for improvement, like rsyncing /opt/zimbra directory ). We change usb disks everyday or two and store other disk at somewhere outside the office.
So,
- If Gmail "dumps" us, we can change our MX to Yandex, stuggle couple hours and then continue to work.
- If local server burns, users can continue to work using Gmail while we build & install new one.
We tried rackspace email hosting but it had problems ( some mails doesn't delivered, some incoming mails lost etc ). Fastmail was/is expensive comparing current infrastructure and it could be viable if we have more than 30 persons.
P.S. : I'm not saying this solution is perfect or it's the only way to do, i'm just sharing.
[+] [-] suhastech|13 years ago|reply
</shamelessplug>
[+] [-] buro9|13 years ago|reply
I made a choice that day and I still stick to it:
I split my Google identity.
My original Gmail account is still in use and I use that for anything social, for any settings and preferences... i.e. the non-essential stuff: Google+, Chrome Sync, Android Play Store, and Google Currents.
A Google Apps account deals with anything that I care to keep and is on my private domain: Gmail, Calendar, Contacts, and Drive.
I then used sync control in Android to turn off everything that each account won't use. And in Manage Domain on the Google Apps I disabled G+ and anything social.
For me it's a risk limitation exercise.
Should Google lock my Gmail, I lose things I don't care about. I keep backups (Gmail offline + Grive) of my Google Apps domain, and should that get locked I can change the DNS, setup my own email and restore the backup via IMAP.
I get to benefit from Google services without a large exposure to risk should something happen.
[+] [-] mokash|13 years ago|reply
Sure, you could just set up your own email server but why go through the hassle? There's a real opportunity here, my mother doesn't know how to set up her own email provider, neither does my aunt. A good email provider will make it really easy to do everything related to email with advanced spam filtering capabilities and will run a very tight ship.
A man can dream.
[+] [-] Derbasti|13 years ago|reply
Web access is usually terrible though. If you're lucky, they provide roundcube, which is ok, but certainly inferior to Gmail. If you use IMAP and some desktop client, this might not be a problem.
The hard part is the calendar and contacts. I don't know of any CalDAV or CardDav provider. Your best bet is probably some hosted Exchange solution, which provides ActiveSync.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jamesaguilar|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robomartin|13 years ago|reply
"A few minutes into my Google-less existence, I realized how dependent I had become. I couldn’t finish my work or my taxes, because my notes and expenses were stored in Google Drive, and I didn’t know what else I should work on because my Google calendar had disappeared. I couldn’t publicly gripe about what I was going through, because my Blogger no longer existed. My Picasa albums were gone. I’d lost my contacts and calling plan through Google Voice; otherwise I would have called friends to cry."
And that list of losses can be expanded if you use other Google tools.
Personally, I just don't get it. I was using various forms of email before Google even existed. I settled on Outlook and self-hosted email on Linux a long time ago. Oh yes, MS Office for docs, calendars, etc.. Perfect? Nope. But nobody can flip a switch and take it all away overnight.
I simply could not fathom running any of my businesses with this kind of daily risk. Any one of your employees could trigger a Google account shutdown and cost you dearly.
What's the problem here? Are MS license fees too expensive when compared to loosing all of your data overnight?
As for the other non-MS Office services offered by Google, well, there are tons of alternatives, free and paid.
I was lucky enough to learn this lesson about three years ago when a client's account was shut down merely for moving about two hundred domains to a an "AdSense for Domains" service they used to offer. Bam! Three days later their entire account is shutdown, AdWords, AdSense, Gmail, Docs, everything. Wow. New user too.
From that point forward I made a few decisions I have yet to violate:
So far, so good. Email, documents, backups and collaboration existed just fine before Google was even an idea in someone's head. Don't be lured into something that can kill your business and cause you personal financial damage.If I were running an investment firm I would have a clause in my contracts requiring that no business-critical services are to be hosted by Google on any companies we'd invest on. Talk about playing with fire. Invest millions into a venture and Google pulls their data backbone from right under them? Crap! Screw that.
[+] [-] sgift|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kybernetyk|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|13 years ago|reply
"Free email, with 1 GB of email storage? Neat". "Nice fast web-browser, nice features? Neat!" etc etc.
People on HN do AB testing for button colours in an effort to reduce friction to the lowest possible. It's not that surprising that people think "it wont happen to me".
See also people who never make backups until they learn the lesson that first time they lose everything.
[+] [-] aaron695|13 years ago|reply
A. Does anyone have a valid story were the user actually lost everything, for good?
B. Assuming it's possible the risk of catastrophic failure by losing Google can still be lower in a risk assessment than the cost of redundancy or of making each part independent. Especially in a startup where there is already risk everywhere.
[+] [-] nsns|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josscrowcroft|13 years ago|reply
1) A hands-off, hassle-free service that connects to all your Google 'properties' and backs up everything every hour, on the hour, and allows easy importing into a selection of similar replacement services if/when the Googleplex smites me down.
2) See 1).
[+] [-] johnsbrayton|13 years ago|reply
You can download CloudPull from: http://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/
CloudPull is free for a single account. For $9.99, you can upgrade to get premium features including support for up to ten Google accounts.
John
[+] [-] eloisant|13 years ago|reply
Now when a problem arise, just stop using GMail and use Roundcube directly.
[+] [-] karussell|13 years ago|reply
ToDos for Google: Offline routing, Own Games, Porn, Ebay, Amazon clone
[+] [-] gap|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] D9u|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guard-of-terra|13 years ago|reply
If there isn't then what you're doing is called "taunting".
[+] [-] antoko|13 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_redundancy
We have a term for what you're describing already - Backups
[+] [-] eksith|13 years ago|reply
You don't own what you can't control. Even if your name is on it, even if you've given it to everyone, even if you use it on a million other accounts as a means of access and an identity, you don't really own it.
This is why, I still keep a contact@domain for professional work while saving all my personal stuff on Gmail locally via POP.
The nice thing about HN (or the bad thing; depends on your perspective) is that it doesn't need an email. I wish more watering holes were like that. Alas, people are flaky with passwords and need resetting from time to time.
[+] [-] jfoster|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexeston|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frozenport|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ubersync|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thomaslutz|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|13 years ago|reply
Everything was backed up. My passwords were safely stored. But it was going to take some time to get to them.
I did have my Google password, so I logged in. I was on a different computer, a different OS, a different network. I was asked to enter my Google Authenticator number, and then BAMM I got access to everything.
I realised just how scary the Google 'Save passwords' thing is.
I trust Google, and I know they have smart people working on security.
We've seen similar where someone having their Google account hacked lost access to everything.
This should be part of your back up / disaster planning. I guess there's a niche for a single page check-list of what people should be storing 'just in case'.