Google+ Account Suspensions Over ToS Drawing Fire

ideonexus writes "Reports of Google+ deleting user accounts are all over, including Limor Fried — AKA Lady Ada / Adafruit Industries (recently featured in Wired Magazine) and former Google employee Kirrily 'Skud' Robert for violating Google's identity ToS. Other users are finding themselves locked out of their accounts without an explanation of how they violated the ToS. The worst part for these individuals is that a lock-out of Google+ includes being locked out of all Google services, including email, calendar, and documents."

Comments

No kidding

[Sycraft-fu]

Makes me reconsider if I wish to use it. If Google shut down my G+ account, or Facebook shut down my account or the like I'd lose no sleep over it. I really am not in to social networking and I think it is mostly a silly way for people to waste time at work (I've got better ways to waste time at work, like Slashdot :). However I would be rather angry if my G-mail account was shut down. I have a lot of important things directed to it and it would be rather inconvenient if shut down.

I signed up because friends invited me. I'll have to think if I want to stay signed up as G+ is just something silly to keep my friends happy, G-mail is something I use a lot and I don't want one to risk the other.

Back up your damn Gmail

[David Gerard]

You get up tomorrow and log into GMail. You can't get in. Your account is locked. Your mail, calendar, documents — all gone. What do you do now?

Remember that Google has no customer service, even for paying customers. If your account is locked for any reason, spurious or not, you're utterly fucked.

I keep a regular backup of my GMail. The official interface is IMAP, but GMail's IMAP implementation is really flaky (e.g. Thunderbird or mail.app won't suck everything down). The way to do this that actually works is with OfflineIMAP. It's command-line and geeky, but by crikey it works.

Using it on Ubuntu or Debian is absurdly simple:

• sudo apt-get install offlineimap
• Set up a ~/.offlineimaprc file cut'n'pasted from this one, with your own username and password.
• offlineimap

This will create a folder with all your mail in it, in mbox format (readable plain text). You will have duplicate messages in different folders. I'm just doing this to get an archive, so zipped the result.

GMail's IMAP interface is subtly broken, to the point where it can crash offlineimap. Just start it running again, repeat as often as necessary. (If you like, get a more current version.)

GMail is still the best email interface I've ever used, and I wish Thunderbird would just get the hint and clone it to the last detail. But this way I also have all my stuff myself, just because I can.

I haven't tried this on a Mac or Windows. Could someone do this and write up instructions?

For other Google services, you can get your data from Google Takeout. While your account's not locked.