ON GMAIL LOCKDOWN (Part II)

POST-MORTEM

As I reported in an update to yesterday's post, my Google Gmail lockdown (which was in effect a lockout), ended after 25 hours of no access to my Gmail account and no recourse with Google support other than back and forth communication with Google's automated email support system.

So now I have full Gmail access again, which I guess should be thankful for, but the whole thing grates a bit as a long-time, paying customer and general Gmail enthusiast.  Which I remain by the way, despite this speed-bump on the road.

I thought I'd summarize my thoughts on Gmail and POP/IMAP access via desktop or mobile email clients following this experience.

Also, I got some good suggestions from readers, which I also wanted to address. 

I spent a good bit of time yesterday, trying to get some official Google information on what may have caused my lockdown beyond the boiler-plate information on lockdown, including checking the Official Gmail blog. 

But other than finding out it's shared by a lot of people for two years now, and is also referred to by the ominous sounding phrase "Lockdown in Sector 4", I didn't get very far.  Apparently happens enough that Google even has an official "answer" of sorts to POP induced lockdown in their FAQ.  This answer though doesn't say that your account can be locked down for at least 24 hours.  They suggest instead checking back every hour and hope for the best.  Not clear if praying helps a bit more.

First, in the absence of any communication from Google as to why SPECIFICALLY my account was locked down (as opposed to the laundry list of reasons their email robot had sent me), I thought I'd explain again what I thought was the cause of the lock down.

All I'd done different from my normal Gmail usage, was to enable two Mac Mail 3.0 based machines (a desktop and a laptop) to access my Gmail account via POP. 

As far as I know every Gmail account is POP-enabled by default, going back to about five months of one's email.  In my case it was May 6th.  In other words, when I connected to my Gmail account via Mail 3.0 on my iMac, it started to download all my email as of May 6th. 

There are options in the Settings section of Gmail to configure POP downloads to ALL your mail, or to none, when connecting to a client for the first time.  I haven't tried the latter yet, and would definitely not try the former given my experience.  Google may lock me out for 24 days instead of 24 hours.

Doing the same thing concurrently on TWO Macs apparently triggered the default software that Google Gmail apparently uses to monitor email accounts for possible spam attacks, hacker attacks, and other breaches of a user's Gmail account.  That is a GOOD THING.

Apparently though, the software is not able to distinguish between legitimate, rapid downloads of emails from email clients enabled by the account owner. 

Reader John M.  suggested in a comment that I try connecting my email client with  Gmail's newly rolled out IMAP access, which I would have very much preferred, but Gmail has not enabled the IMAP feature yet for my Gmail account.

(For those not familiar with POP vs. IMAP, the latter is a more of a synced, two-way, sustained connection between an email account on a server and a desktop email client.  More on POP vs. IMAP here at Google Gmail).

In fact, the most recent post on Gmail's official blog, is all about the benefits of IMAP access to your Gmail account via your PCs, and mobile devices.

However, it's not clear if IMAP would also trigger a Gmail lockdown or not, just like multiple POP access apparently did. s reader Mike S. put it in his comment yesterday:

"IMAP is not a panacea to this problem, as Apple Mail will still try to synchronize with GMail, as it does with POP.

The problem here seems to be that Google lit up IMAP support, but didn't think through all the implications for their anti-spam/anti-using-Gmail-as-remote-storage rules. Specifically, no one seems to have grasped that people will enable IMAP on multiple devices, those devices will need to sync, and those initial syncs will mean needing to download significant amounts of data from multiple clients, perhaps simultaneously."

So until I get some official information from Gmail that POP and/or IMAP access will NOT arbitrarily cause account lockdowns, at the default settings, I'm not going to try this again.  This despite the fact that the possibility of Gmail lockdown is not mentioned in Google's own FAQ on "Known IMAP issues".

Instead, for now, I'm going to start thinking having back-up access to my Gmail data on other email services.  Living in the Cloud is great and everything, but is really a sharp drop on a cloudless day.

I wouldn't make a big deal about all this were it just about my experience on this.  I think there are at least two broader issues here:

1.  More mainstream users will be connecting their Gmail account to POP and IMAP (as it's rolled out), and will likely experience this.  Apparently, it doesn't matter if you do this via a PC, Mac or other devices.  This has been a problem for at least two years, as I pointed out from the Google searches in yesterday's post.

2.  Now that Gmail is officially out of Beta, and has premium services that many users pay for, AND is mission-critical to most of those users in their daily lives, Google really needs to re-think the support infrastructure for this service. 

Blanket lockdowns and interaction with robo-mail servers just won't do any more for a grown-up Gmail service.  At the very least, some sort of escalation mechanism for honest customers with urgent needs should be implemented sooner than later.

So I'll track developments on this going forward, even though my Gmail account is not locked down any more (for now).

Comments

[Steven]

I just got locked out of Gmail after using IMAP on 2 computers. So, IMAP won't solve this problem.

It's now about 22 hours, so I think it'll be the full day for me too. I sent a request to Gmail support, but they don't seem to care to respond me. Where did you send your request or mail?

[mpbk]

Same problem here. Tried to sync PC Desktop/Thunderbird and Mac Laptop/Mail.app at the same time. Now I'm locked out for the day. Sucks.

If anything, they should only ever lock out the IMAP access if that is what proves to be the problem. Under no circumstances should they ever lock out the Web access. That's just stupid.

[hans]

Just happened to me on imap after uploading about 250MB worth of email from my inbox in mail.app (leopard) to a fresh google apps [email protected] address.

Was working fine, even though mail was configured to check every 15 minutes I was receiving emails instantly via REST, and it kept working for a couple of hours afterward,at which point I couldn't remember why I was still on exchange.

Until I deleted a message from the inbox in mail.app, at which point I got locked down in sector 4. luckily I didn't move my MX, so I have my old exchange account hot for backup, but man this was on just one computer, didn't switch blackberry, iphone, or the other laptop over. I suppose it doesn't doesn't matter that I'm paying the princely sum of $50 for the year?

Perhaps the issue was I had the gmail interface open as well to troubleshoot why messages from:me to:me didn't show up in my inbox (old, bad habit) while I was using mail.app, and left it open the whole time.

Also, it could have been the speed at which everything synced, or the manner. Interestingly enough on IMAP, there were two syncs. first, it uploaded everything at roughly 1Mbps, and simultaneously (I guess kicked off by rest) it started downloading the messages from the server (according to activity monitor) at 1.7 megaBYTEs per second. I'm used to exchange, where things happen a little more slowly, so I thought maybe it was just local cache syncing up with itself, envelope index, etc. But no duplication, but maybe the two way thing is the issue.

I'm not certain about anything, aside from the fact that you do get what you pay for.