[liberationtech] Gmail Hell

[Yosem Companys]

Mike asked me to post this on the Liberationtech mailing list on his
behalf, as for reasons that will become apparent when you read the post
below, he is unable to do so himself.

Best,

Yosem



Gmail Hell Day 4: Dealing with the Borg (Or “Being Evil” Without Really
Thinking About It
Posted by Mike Gurstein on February 25, 2012
http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2012/02/25/gmail-hell-day-4-dealing-with-the-borg-or-being-evil-without-really-thinking-about-it/


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 onlineJournal 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 at 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, bare 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.

Sorry… account maintenance underway

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 at 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

Mail Delivery Subsystem mailer-daemon at googlemail.com

7:02 AM (22 hours ago)
to me

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:

gurstein at gmail.com

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 at 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 at 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.

(Mike can be reached at <mgurst at vcn.bc.ca>)
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