How satisfied are you with your overall Gmail experience?

About a month ago my primary Gmail account started playing up. I noticed that most times I tried to use the webmail interface to read my mail it wouldn't let me log in, and on the rare occasion that it did let me in, it would freeze up after a minute or two. My other Gmail account was fine, but I had never used it for anything, so none of my mail was going to that address.

I managed to get logged in to my primary account long enough to set up POP and forwarding. I enabled POP3 downloading and set up forwarding so that all incoming mail would be forwarded to my other Gmail account.

Around this time I read GMail Horror Story, got scared at the prospect of losing all my email and decided to back it all up using POP3. First I tried using Thunderbird, the free client from the Mozilla Corporation. It would only download 300 or so messages at a time, so I set it to download new messages once per minute. The Gmail server kept timing out, so I ended up with multiple copies of some of my message. After downloading 5000 or so of my messages the CPU kept going to 100% and staying there for a long time. I don't know if this is a well-known problem with Thunderbird or not, but after trying to get help with it for a few hours I gave up and tried Eudora instead.

Eudora would also only download the mail in batches of 300 or so, and also suffered from server timeouts, and duplicate messages, but it seemed to cope a lot better with the volume of messages than Thunderbird did, so I stuck with it. After 36 hours it had downloaded all my emails, around 11,000 of them.

Last Saturday the 8th, about a day after the download had finished, my Gmail account was disabled. Every time I tried to log in using the webmail interface I was greeted with a message saying:

Sorry… account maintenance underway

We're currently performing some unexpected maintenance on your account. While we can't predict exactly how long it will take, we're working as quickly as we can to restore access to your email–apologies for the inconvenience.

If you have questions, please contact us at gmail-maintenance@google.com.

At that point I could no longer access my account using POP3, and was also locked out of the web interface. Anyone trying to email me would get an automatic response saying that there was a delay in delivering my message, and that delivery would be retried for 6 more days. Each day another automatic email was sent, until day 7 when a final failure message was sent. So now my account has been down so long that I'm actually losing emails.

I sent an email to the address given in the error message, but just received a canned text response back. I replied to the canned reply, but heard nothing back.

Then yesterday evening I found an address on a google groups posting, which can be used to inform google that you're locked out of your account. I filled the form in, and shortly after received a reply:

From: The Google Team <mail-support@google.com>
To: me
Date: Apr 14, 2006 8:13 PM
Subject: Re: [#nnn] Access form: Oops

Hello,

Thank you for your reply.

Our system has detected unusual usage of your Gmail account. For your protection, we have temporarily disabled all access to your account. However, you should be able to access your account again within 24 hours. In the meantime, we suggest waiting to download the rest of your Gmail messages. Alternatively, you may want to select 'Enable POP only for mail that arrives from now on.'

If you suspect that the unusual usage of your account has been caused by a third party, we recommend that you change your password and secret question once you are able to log back in to Gmail.

If you are using any software that automatically logs in to your account, or automatically sends and receives messages, we ask that you disable the software before accessing Gmail again. Please note that the use of such third-party software is not supported by Gmail. Also, using certain browser extensions that change the behavior of a website may cause your Gmail account to be temporarily disabled (Greasemonkey, a popular Firefox extension, often interferes with Gmail. We suggest disabling Greasemonkey to use Gmail without any issues).

Sincerely,

The Google Team

I liked the "you should be able to access your account again within 24 hours" bit, but was a little disappointed that again it looked like a canned response. I mean, what kind of 'unusual usage' had they seen on my account? Is it unusual to want to back up your account? Or had something else been happening?

24 hours later, however, the situation was unchanged. I was still seeing the same error message when I tried to log in, so I sent another email, asking what was going on.

Shortly after sending my reply I saw that I had another mail from Gmail, and was surprised at how responsive their support team was being all of a sudden. Then I noticed the subject:

From: mail-support@google.com <mail-support@google.com>
To: me
Date: Apr 15, 2006 8:48 PM
Subject: Rate your recent Gmail support experience

Hi,

Can you help us improve Gmail support? We welcome feedback about your recent experience so that we can improve the way we serve you.

Share your thoughts by answering five quick questions via the link below.

http://services.google.com/surveys/ts_gmail?t=<nnn>

Your thoughts will help us to serve you better in the future.

Sincerely,

The Google Team

I've not filled in the response form yet; I think I'll wait and see what happens next.