So have you missed me lately? Probably not. I don’t post all that often, so you probably just figured I was taking some time off. But no. Sometime on May 4th, my Google account was disabled. My GMail account was disabled. My Google Calendar account was disabled. I would try to log in and it would tell me “Sorry, your account has been disabled. Please go to some website if you think this is in error”. Of course it did give the actual website; I just don’t remember what it was.

I wanted to blog about how annoying this all was. But of course my Blogger account is tied into Google, so it too was disabled.

So naturally I went there and filled out the form. Nothing. I filled it out several times, and each time, got not even an auto-responder saying that they had gotten my message.

And then I waited….

And waited…

And waited…

Now granted there is an annoyingness to being cut off from all your mail and calendar and blogging and everything. But what made this even MORE annoying was the fact that I had just gotten things started with the Getting Things Done. For more info, click on the link, but basically it’s a way to organize your life to make sure you get done all the things that you want. I had combined that with GTD Inbox which uses GMail to keep track of all the “Next Actions” you need to do.

So here I am, feeling all productive, when every thing in my inbox is now unavailable. So I didn’t know all the things I needed to do. Very frustrating. So instead I just sat on the couch, watched TV and ate bonbons. Or rather, stared at the hole where our TV used to be.

To recap, My Google account was disabled. My GMail account was disabled. My Google account was locked. My GMail account was locked. I repeat that in case this happens to anyone else, so they can find my blog while searching and know that they are not alone.

So what did I do to fix it? Nothing. I filled out their form on a daily basis (probably 4-5 times). I filled out a few other forms like GMail security or abuse, but I don’t think they did anything. 5 days later (on May 9th) I get an email in my alternate email saying

“Hello,

Thank you for your report.

We apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced. The issue
you
described should now be resolved. If you continue to experience
difficulties, please respond to this message, and we’ll investigate
further.

Sincerely,

The Google Team”

That’s it. No explanation or anything. I did get all my old email and contacts and such, but all my mail from the 5 day period was gone. In talking to friends, they said that messages sent to me during that time bounced back as undeliverable, so I am not holding out any hope for them showing up any time soon.

I haven’t decided if I’m going to give Google another chance, but if I do, I’ll definitely try to be more diligent about backing things up and exporting my contacts / OPML Google Reader lists / Calendar / email somewhere else, so if this happens again, I won’t be caught so dead in the water.Gmail account disabled