Last night I angered the Google gods

I got the bright idea to download my entire gmail account to Outlook 2007 (beta2). I've had my account since June 2004, so I thought I would kick off the download process and come back in a few hours to see how it was doing. I noticed Gmail would let me download the email in blocks of ~500, which is pretty generous on their part. Thanks Google!

What I didn't know was that you aren't supposed to check your email using a browser while you're downloading it using a POP client. It seems like I raised a red flag with Google and they temporarily suspended me. Error! Lockdown in Sector 4!. At least, that's the error I've been seeing on Gmail for the last 24 hours.

No biggie, right?

I never realized how much I'm locked into Google products. I'm indebted to them for making such an amazing, free product. I've come to take the simplicity, speed, and portability of their online tools for granted. This goes for Google Reader, Google Calendar, and of course Google Search. These are tools I can't imagine living without. If they started to charge, I would pay for it. Seriously.

Gmail SPAM (or lack theirof)

As an experiment, on July 1st at 12:00a, I deleted all of my Gmail spam and started watching the spam folder to see if there were any "false positives". Over the course of a month I've had to identify 11 emails as being SPAM (great, considering I get 1300+ SPAM a month), but not one real email got tossed into the SPAM mix. Great job Google!



Note: After almost exactly 24 hours, Gmail is back online for me. Yay!