I’m an email guy. I live (and live and maybe one day I’ll die) with email… I use email to do the online class I’m teaching at a major Canadian university, I use email to manage the online Journal of Community Informatics that I edit, I use email to host the bunch of Community Informatics email lists that I supervise, I use email to participate in a the bunch of email lists that I use to keep informed and help me to interact with those areas of civil society (Governance, Human Rights, ICT4 Development) that I am active in, I use email (and of course skype) to communicate with my family and friends, I use email as the primary means for marketing and management the rental unit that myself and my wife own and overall I use email and my email address as my primary means of communication with and from the outside world.
Since about 2006 my primary email address and thus interface with the e-world has been gurstein@gmail.com. Nice, clean, functional (my kids are envious and I’ve had semi-serious discussions about to whom among the half dozen or so people in the world with the same last name (in that spelling it is quite rare) I’ll ultimately bequeath it to…
My email pattern is to use my gmail account as the reception point and then POP my mail off into an Outlook 2003 client that I’ve dragged along with me through 3 or 4 computers over the last 5 years. This process has worked for me reasonably well over the last years and I’m comfortable with it and the couple of thousand folks in my email directory are also comfortable with the name and how I’m communicating with them.
Anyway, earlier this month I was in Dhaka, Bangladesh working on an ICT and Development project. About midway through my stay in Dhaka one night during my regular jet-lagged 2 am email fest my Internet suddenly stopped working. I checked around and it seemed that the problem was with the hotel’s wireless provider. When the Internet came back on there seemed to be some continuing problem with the POP connection with my Outlook… I was getting mail coming in on my gmail account but it wasn’t POPing properly to my Outlook account.
(I’m not a technical whiz… so I started fiddling with my Outlook and somehow, I can’t really remember how, I ended up installing a new (but the same) account on my Outlook and the email started rolling in as usual into my Outlook–POPing off of gmail. (for those with little or no technical interest, bear with me a bit, there is a Community Informatics, and a policy point at the end of this that I think is worth thinking about…
To my dismay however, what was entering into my Outlook wasn’t the usual stream of email rather it was long forgotten (and ultimately by-passed) email from 2006. It turns out that when you create a “new” Outlook account as I had just done when you POP your mail off of gmail it doesn’t start at the end of your inbox, rather it starts at the beginning!
Now remember, I’m an email guy and I’ve been using my gmail account for storing mail that I would “POP” and then work with in Outlook. Of course, gmail has a maximum free storage of something like 7 gigs or so but my gmail file exceeded that 2 or 3 years ago and I’ve been paying Google a modest amount ever since for extra storage space. My current gmail file is at around 12 gigs and 120,000 emails–yes a lot, and yes, I should have been systematically going through this mail and sorting, discarding etc.etc. but I didn’t and I was willing to pay Google to not have to do this.
Realizing that downloading 12 gigs of mail (120,000 emails) in 3-500 email bursts (all that Outlook (or gmail) seemed to allow) was going to be a long and tedious exercise I turned to gmail “help” to see if there was some other way around this (I had had something similar happen to me 3 years ago while I was in South Africa and at the time there was nothing for it but to download all the mail (at $30 or so a gig) in order to begin again at the end 🙂
So I turned to what Google laughably identifies as its “help” function… “Settings” –> “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” etc.etc. and after an astonishing number of steps I’m taken to this gmail Help Forum where I am told that there are (among other things)
38137 discussions · Ask a “how to” question
Use this category if you want to know how to do something.
and
33348 discussions · Computer email program (please specify: Apple Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird, etc)
Email programs are also known as POP or IMAP email clients.
Clearly gmail is popular and other people also seem to have problems.
So I go into this “help” function and I am literally placed in the middle of an ocean of information and techie geeks without a paddle or a usable glossary.
I have no idea what search terms to use for my particular problem and the ones that I am able to figure out seem to take me to one or two year old comments from people like me with similar issues who were complaining about having to download their entire gmail inboxes as I was ending up doing.
I formulate and post a couple of queries to the forum trying to indicate what my problem is but no replies…
So, I set about downloading my 120,000 emails at 3-500 emails a chunk (that is a very large number of chunks and takes a considerable length of time since Outlook has its own set of issues including a maximum size for its mail files.
Four days later I am getting close to the end of the process when my capacity to download from Gmail is suddenly closed off “temporarily” because of “unusual activity” but according to the page that turns up when I try to access the account it will be turned back on fairly soon (they say) and it was.
Of course, there is no direct communication–the “messages” from gmail/Google are all in the form of standard web screens that appear when attempting to access gmail with no pointers anywhere except back to the gmail forums and a Google “help” search window which isn’t very useful if you can’t figure out the appropriate search terms! (and I tried dozens…
So, an hour or so later I get access to my gmail account again and resume where I left off with the downloading (I’m up to the end of 2010 by this time and the present is beckoning in a most tantalizing fashion and anyway I still have no idea of any alternative to what I’ve been doing over the last number of days…
One more day along and I’m getting into the home stretch (mid-June 2011) when this below appears when I try to access my gmail account.
|
| We are currently working on your account because an error occurred with your mail storage. Your account data and messages are safe. However, you won’t be able to log in until our team is finished.We can’t predict exactly how long this will take, but if you are still unable to access your account in 48 hours, please contact us with your username at gmail-maintenance@google.com . We apologize for the disruption. |
That was roughly 4 days ago.
My first reaction was panic… what am I to do… Not only can I not download my mail but I can’t even access it, nor can I access my mail file (and thus my entire 6 year mail archive!)
I send off an email to “gmail-maintenance”, feverishly scan Google for points of entry into the Google Borg-o-sphere for my problem, send an email to the only person I know in Google who might be in a position to help, then another email to “gmail-maintenance” … and I wait… Nothing… I wait some more… nothing.. I’m incommunicado in the e-world, the only world that I’ve been really communicado in for the last dozen years or so!
Everything comes to a halt, my class, the Journal, my elists, the 3 or 4 projects I have on the go around the world… everything…
Folks, if you haven’t experienced this you have no idea the feeling of having been broken off in your communications capacity with your world and as well the loss of your e-memory of everything and everyone that you have been in touch with since you bit the gmail apple!
And folks attempting to communicate with you of course get this form email
|
7:02 AM (22 hours ago) | |||
|
||||
This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification
THIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY.
YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE.
Delivery to the following recipient has been delayed:
Message will be retried for 13 more day(s)
Technical details of temporary failure:
Account temporarily disabled
(I particularly liked the slightly ominous and potentially shameful–“explanation” (“Account temporarily disabled”)–for this lack of communicability. What could he possibly have been doing that has provoked those nice people at Google to “disable his account”?
Toward the end of Day 2, and after the 5 or so unanswered/unacknowledged messages to the kind folks at gmail-maintenance@google.com I start to move from shock and awe to recovery and I set up a new account (gmail of course 😦 it’s so easy and it’s free after all… as a means to begin to re-establish contact with the outside world.
I’m now into Day 4 of “Account maintenance” mode i.e. I can’t access my normal gmail account or inbox (although last evening for a few very brief moments my inbox was accessible but this disappeared behind the outer carapace of the Borg once again–which is where it stands at the moment.
According to the Google search I just did some 720,341,564 people use gmail all over the world. This is a truly astonishing number and the access to the information about those people that Google obtains through the provision of the “free” gmail service has made Google one of the largest and most profitable and (at least in the tech and information world) most powerful companies in the world.
But with great wealth and great power comes (or at least should come) great responsibility and my little excursion into gmail hell indicates that not only is Google operating in a thoroughly irresponsible fashion but with its choice to offer a Borg-like interface with its users (and clients remember that I’m paying for the storage of my gmail file) it is crossing the line from neglect to actual “being evil”.
Probably many if not most of the roughly billion people currently using gmail aren’t as heavily invested in their account and e-address as I am but I would guess that a rather large are as or even more invested in a life and death way.
Some of the ways in which gmail/Google is not accepting its responsibility to its users/clients include…
That gmail can “temporarily suspend” my account with no explanation or recourse or even means of communicating back to them to provide the background to whatever my transgression has been,
That the “help” function for gmail is nothing more than a huge untended, unedited flea market of bits and pieces of expertise, experience, knowledge combined completely blind with inexperience, misdirection, and useless information,
That there is no accessible and responsive point of contact for circumstances such as mine (and anecdotally I’m hearing that these circumstances are rather more common than not)–remember that I’ve now sent 7 emails to gmail-maintenance@google.com without one reply or even acknowledgement!
Given the impact of the above on my personal circumstances gmail/Google has acted in an “evil” way towards me–not just irresponsible but actually evil in that I have had no recourse, no means of providing supplemental information, no way of pleading my case, no indication as to when my particular excursion into gmail hell might end or what form that final resolution might take. I’m in limbo–Kafka’s Castle, the Borg, HAL–you name the nightmare scenario of dealing with implacable, faceless, unresponding authority/power/privilege and that is what you have with gmail in my life and ultimately and potentially in the lives of any of the other billion or so gmail users.
Why for example, gmail/Google hasn’t spent the money to set up an Ombudsperson service with an email that someone actually reads and answers is something that would, if Google were as I mentioned selling milk or mining coal, be something that legislatures would be compelling them to do… Providing instructions and “help” information that are intelligible to ordinary users would be the subject of regulation if they were selling toasters or refrigerators rather than an email service. Giving an explanation about the “temporary suspension” of a vital service would be required by law if it were concerning the flow of clean water or electricity rather than the (arguably) equally necessary flow of information and communications.
If gmail was a service delivering milk, or providing electricity or supporting financial transactions they would be regulated and the kind of behaviour I’m describing above would be subject to government intervention, legal sanctions, political inquiries. Because the world of the Internet is so new, so shiny, so global it is a free-for-all and global utilities such as Google (which is what email/gmail is in practice and as it should be understood in law) can be as they are, with no recourse from individual users who after all are scattered and isolated and without any of the resources that a Google can command.
And notably the world has not yet managed to catch up so there are no frameworks available globally to deal with issues such as mine (or megaliths such as Google)… They will come in time but a lot of folks are going to feel a lot of pain, and Borgs like Google are going to get away with doing (and being) a lot of evil in the meantime.
Gurstein's Community Informatics 
Deirdre Williams
February 25, 2012
But Gmail ISN’T free – and we should stop saying that it is.
As with many transactions nowadays the ‘value’ provided by the purchaser is not money, but something which represents money (and money itself is only a symbol of value)
When I consider ‘purchasing’ a Gmail account, I go to Google and see what their terms are. In exchange for the account I allow them the use of certain information about me which they in turn can convert into money.
Therefore it seems to me that they are obliged to provide the service which is their part of the exchange. In your case even more so in that you have a double agreement – one in which you provide information, and the other in which, more conventionally, you provide money.
Too much smoke and mirrors nowadays! we need to remember that ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch’.
Michael Gurstein
February 25, 2012
Hi Deidre,
I agree…
M
Tom Lowenhaupt
February 25, 2012
Sorry to hear of your travails. A nightmare indeed.
The creation of a friendlier, more efficient, and responsible mail delivery service would seem to be in order. Some regulatory best practices might help. With these practices taught in conjunction with learning to write in kindergarten.
Sylvia Caras
February 25, 2012
I use Gmail also, and moved to your blog from your post on the Governance email list. I too have sent comments to Google, not emails though, and I expect they have been tabulated but not read. More broadly, my recent experience with Google, at least the last six months, is that it seems like some techies on speed are playing, making changes so the tools are no longer transparent – moving navigation icons around, imposing drop-downs so that tasks that took one click now take two, imposing ‘new’ formats that demand more attention, more color, more bling, and of course the new no-privacy policy.
I’ve switched from Chrome to Firefox but am still using Gmail. Since Gmail has a much better spam filter than my ISP, I read in the cloud and trust Google to archive. That’s been quite satisfactory. What I think is that the new log in pages will be having big ads and there will no way to detour around them.
I can empathize with not having access, worse when traveling, dealing with auto-responders, … I think though there’s a naivete in your expectations – this is a free service and the provider chooses software over humans.
Sylvia
Michael Gurstein
February 25, 2012
Sylvia,
As Deidre mentions we are paying for the gmail service through providing our information to them… For the most part it is a fair transaction except that l have rather better customer service from all of my other service providers and as well since I am paying for storage they presumably have some sort of obligation to allow me to communicate with them.
M
Kiringai Kamau
February 25, 2012
Thanks for sharing this experience Michael,
Of course the worked does not gave as many people who can recount of their usage of 12gigs of mail data!
It seems to me like we may all want to keep our usage free, may be Goooogle is not happy with what you describe as ‘small money’…they are used to big money or none at all.
Kiringai Kamau
Nairobi-Kenya
Michael Gurstein
February 26, 2012
Tks Kiringai there are a lot of lessons that one can draw from my experience and the role of those with “small money” problems in a “big money” world are certainly one of them.
Mike
D~Sadoway
February 26, 2012
Sorry to hear about your frustrating experiences Michael. But, glad to hear you have be virtually revived…
Coincidentally I am writing about ‘cyberspaces of hope’ at the moment and a key part of this idea is that if civil society is to realize the ‘hopeful’ potentialities in ICTs it paradoxically needs to come to the place where it engages in a deeply critical analytics of ICTs. Given our species’ historical experiences with technologies and techno-optimism or techno-determinism, I sometimes wonder how easy an ongoing ‘critical hope’ approach would be for people to accept, or to get the hang of. It seems to me that Community Informatics, provides some important inspiration and memes here.
In any case your recent experiences seems to point to a number of longer-term issues that many of us may have dealt with (or will be) dealing with in the future. One of these revolves around ‘consumer rights’ for the little guy vs. the role of integrated ‘rising’ media conglomerates—particularly in a world of ever-widening webs (beyond traditional consumer protection regimes).
Another issue is about when companies that are too big (actually might fail their ‘customers,’ or perhaps could fail in the much longer term–say ~25-100yrs hence) and what be the implications for personal data or archives in such cloud-based environments. Already many of these issues arise with lost psswds and/or people passing on. Yes, multiplexing, multimodalities and back-ups, etc. are important, but so might be more non-profit, collaborative or co-operative digital solutions. The ‘open source movement’ provides plenty of inspiration and maybe we are in need of open source style, collaborative email operations. Of course many of us left these years ago for the (seemingly) faster, better services…but your experiences remind us of the possible ‘price’ we might be paying for buying into the e-big thing.
Finally, your references to ‘the Borg’ seems very apt (I’m presuming you refer to Star Trek’s all consuming, all appropriating actor-network, hive like cyborgian entity—known as “the Borg”). I’ve often felt that the Borg represented a striking (and troubling) allusion for at least one of two distopic trajectories facing much of the ‘wired’ globe today. One is ‘networked authoritarianism’ sometimes evident in the parts of the region of the world where I presently reside (E.Asia) — and the second, ‘networked capitalism’, sometimes evident in the world where I grew up (N.America). When faced with such a Hobbesian choice between these Borgian Siamese Twins, one certainly finds difficulty even finding critical hope. Of course the option remains to just unplug from it all…
In any case, we are happy to digital interface with you once again in the hopes that one day soon we might face-to-face and share a java or two.
~david (fellow CI-trekkie)
Michael Gurstein
February 26, 2012
Thanks for your comments David and particularly for tieing things back and forward into other of the conceptual networks that I was looking to make a connection with… One thing to note is that among the several email addresses/identities/flowing into my e-presence in the world is one that as you say I “left these years ago”… I still have an account which is with one of the original community networks/ISP (Vancouver Community Network hhtp://www2.vcn.bc.ca )… I used it for years (before gmail) as a primary account and they have the characteristics that you describe of being a collaborative non-profit digital solution.
Another commentator on my blogpost commented on an e-list as follows
+ Your mail server — the physical machine — should be
located within easy driving distance of your principal
place of abode or business.
+ It should be operated and maintained by a human whom you
have met face to face and whose name and reliable
contact info you know, probably a small- or medium-sized
business owner or a tech manager or system administrator
for same.
which is precisely the characteristics of VCN. (As a side-note I’ve found myself falling back on VCN and using their 10-15 ? year old Squirrel mail intterface to access that part of my mail identity that hasn’t been transferred over to gmail. And as it happens yesterday at a meeting here in Vancouver I ran into the VCN administrator and we chatted a bit about my email issues and while doing that I had a deep recognition of what you and the commentator were saying. Here was a real person, someone I could talk to, who would listen sympathetically to my problems, would ask the one or two questions needed to translate my technical inarticulateness into something comprehensible by he and his team of volunteers and resolve the problem quickly, cleanly and humanely.
Robin Wilton
February 27, 2012
You sound like an excellent candidate for fastmail.fm… [disclaimer: I have no commercial interest in fastmail.fm other than being a happy customer]. It’s free (though there are also paid-for levels of service); it’s configurable to POP/IMAP or you can just use it as webmail; and it has very well thought out login options for those times when you’re not quite sure you can trust your Internet connection.
Michael Gurstein
February 27, 2012
Tks Robin, I’ll check it out, but my problem is that I have a lot of email/history/archive resting with gmail at the moment and it is hard to shift to another account without figuring out what to do with that.
M
Rene
February 27, 2012
What a nasty experience Michael. We as consumers need to know our rights for sure and possibly take action even if it’s dealing with such a big-name company. One or a few complains may not do much but something will get noticed someday. Only problem is who to file a complain too? 😦
Rene.
Michael Gurstein
February 27, 2012
Tks Rene, and I couldn’t agree more.
M
timgdavies
February 29, 2012
A small response, but I’ve been encouraged by watching this thread and other e-mail conversations to make sure I refer to ‘google customers’ rather than ‘users’ in a current paper.
Emphasing that any ‘user’ is a customer of the service in a ‘trade data for service’ market, hopefully helps with the narrative of consumer rights and customer service
Michael Gurstein
February 29, 2012
Excellent observation Tim.
M
Alberto Rojas
March 1, 2012
I think you should consider using IMAP instead of POP (which was not designed, but has rather been extended, to support your particular use case).
You can also avoid imap/pop clients altogether by enabling “offline gmail”.
It’s true that Google doesn’t excel in “customer” service even though the customers in the traditional sense of the word are the people paying for ads… we users are more of a provider to Google. But in return, many users don’t excel at using those services either; the amount of spam and abuse is enormous, you wouldn’t believe and in order to keep your account as clean and free of spam as I’m sure it is, some actions tend to cause false positives.
So yes, part of your problem stems from using Outlook (the fact that the new account started downloading from the beginning is because of POP and your client… no way Google could fix that), and partly because of that error Google had with your account. Maybe you were a false positive in the spam&abuse processes (India is a big source of spam, and causing a big amount of traffic from there to a single account must have seemed suspicious to some automated borg over at Google).
Google may never improve the user/customer service (unless people leaving start affecting the bottomline), so if after all this you are still not satisfied, you can stop being a provider to Google and take your business elsewhere. Google will let you take all, ALL your information with you and will let you erase your account (as opposed to, say Facebook that allows neither, or makes it obscure and difficult).
Michael Gurstein
March 1, 2012
The issue to my mind isn’t the technical matter of POP vs. IMAP, it could have been any of a number of other issues (as people have mentioned to me either publicly or privately), the problem is that gmail basically has no useful help function. I don’t consider them a “free” service as they get to access my data while I use their servers to store and forward–I’m okay with the transaction what isn’t okay is to deny me to my end of the bargain with no recourse, no means of communication, no feedback etc. I’m not getting what I’m paying for and in they are causing me damages
As well, their section on “settings” doesn’t tell me that there will be a problem with POP rather it indicates the way in which I should be able to correctly and without interruption link my gmail account by POP with my Outlook account. Various people have indicated that this is probably the problem (but others have also indicated that I might have other and more difficult with issues with IMAP) but be that as it may, to follow your logic it would be like someone giving me a map to a particular destination with two possible routes one of which goes over a cliff and the other doesn’t… Surely the provider of the map has a responsibility to let me the consumer know if one of the routes is a good one and the other leads to disaster.
Alberto Rojas
March 1, 2012
I see what you mean, and I agree.
Michael Gurstein
March 1, 2012
🙂
M
tharrisan
March 6, 2012
But you went back to g-mail? can’t be that bad…
Michael Gurstein
March 6, 2012
Nothing wrong with gmail as a product, the problem is with their “help” function and I most definitely would not use gmail without backup of crucial email files and functionalities… I would have been able to get back up to speed without gmail without losing all that much but it would have cost me a lot, lot of time and confusion as I tried to replace my primary email address. The point of my story is that with even a minimal help function my particular issue could have been very very quickly and easily resolved with minimal cost/heartache to m and minimal support time from Google.
M