>My requests got closed with a “Thanks for your feedback.” canned response.
This is a prime example of why I don't use my Gmail anymore and why I pay for email. I've read plenty of horror stories of how people lost their Gmail accounts for all kinds of reasons. Most of the losses were completely unrelated to Gmail but related to perceived 'abuse' of Google's other services like Youtube (if your YT account gets shut down for 'copyright abuse', your Gmail will be gone as well). Some people lost Gmail accounts over Google Play store apps they submitted. Basically, if they close your account, your Gmail is linked to it and it's gone too. That scared the heck out of me because I had my whole life in there.
And there's just no way to contact Google's support... unless you know someone at Google.
Author should feel lucky they didn't close his account over this.
Not OP, but I moved all of my email from free Gmail to paid Fastmail about 2 years ago, and I've not had a moment of regret.
I send quite a lot of email for work and other things and I have what I think is a higher-than-average number of email addresses to manage.
One adjustment I made - I now archive older emails to avoid extra storage costs, which in turn means that searching for older emails is slightly more hassle.
Fastmail's web interface and mobile app are not quite as slick (as gmail) but this isn't a big deal for me personally.
I used K-9 for many months and it was just OK. The FastMail app was not a huge improvement (over K-9) but it was still an improvement, at least in my experience. From memory K-9 didn't handle multiple "send-from" accounts as competently as the FastMail app, and there were other quirks that became more irritating over time.
I went with Fastmail. Great service with an excellent customer service. I feel confident that if something were to happen to my account, I wouldn't lose it forever.
I set up my own mail server. It took me a few hours with a few minor hiccups along the way, but after contacting Microsoft and AT&T to get my IP removed from their block lists and asking family and friends to mark my emails as "Not Spam", I am now in control of my email and it feels amazing.
I have also taken the time to run my own calendar and contact services.
For mail, I run Postfix and Dovecot over SSL and access email from my iPhone or web browser using Squirrelmail.
> after contacting Microsoft and AT&T to get my IP removed from their block lists
Yikes.
Isn't this exactly the problem with running your own email setup? And have you not found that keeping on the white side of mail server lists is a constant and moving target?
May I ask, do you send a lot of mail and have multiple accounts? (I do, so this overhead would be impossible for me to manage personally)
This is a prime example of why I don't use my Gmail anymore and why I pay for email. I've read plenty of horror stories of how people lost their Gmail accounts for all kinds of reasons. Most of the losses were completely unrelated to Gmail but related to perceived 'abuse' of Google's other services like Youtube (if your YT account gets shut down for 'copyright abuse', your Gmail will be gone as well). Some people lost Gmail accounts over Google Play store apps they submitted. Basically, if they close your account, your Gmail is linked to it and it's gone too. That scared the heck out of me because I had my whole life in there.
And there's just no way to contact Google's support... unless you know someone at Google.
Author should feel lucky they didn't close his account over this.