The Day My Gmail Died

I use my gmail account for everything. I use the gmail extension for FireFox so that I’m always notified of new mail. I got into gmail very early by purchasing an invitation on ebay for $1 or something.

Well starting this morning I can’t login; it just keeps telling me that my username and password don’t match. It was working great last night so I just figured they were having some problems and it would come back.  By this afternoon it was time to contact them because all of our other gmail accounts are working just fine. I tried resetting the password by having it send an email to my secondary email address. Since I never received an email I filled out their form to recover my account. A few hours later I got an email stating they can’t recover my account because they’re not sure it’s mine. They’d love for me to create a new one and even included a handy link to do so.

I’m a big believer in web based applications and services. It is so nice to have everything managed, backed up, automatically updated, and of course accessible anywhere. Today I’m rethinkiing that a bit. If Google doesn’t restore my account (and I doni’t know if they will, I can’t remember half of the dates and info they want) then I lose a ton of stuff. Hundreds of email messages, dozens of contacts, important documents, unsent drafts, my iGoogle settings, all of my feeds in Reader, and access to our family blog (luckily we have more than one author on that blog or I’d be really upset).

What recourse do I have? It’s not like I pay Google for access, if they cut me off that’s the end of it. So far it’s been an unbelieveably frustrating experience. I know they deal with millions of users, but still they need to find a way to provide better service. It’s not like they don’t have the money to do it.

I know my account is not completely gone because I can still get my iGoogle page with Reader on the machine I was already logged in with. But on other machines it won’t let me in. Unfortunately I can’t get to gmail on that one machine.

In related news our phone isn’t working either, so if you’re trying to get ahold of me, well good luck…I’m pretty much off the grid.

Google, if you’re reading, please give me my account back. I’m really me, I promise.