Gmail Lockdown - more…

Following up on a previous post, I've been locked out of GMail 3 times now – twice in the last week. Starting to identify a pattern: whenever this happens, GMail will be open in a Firefox tab and refreshing itself every second or so. Don't know why it's doing this, but I've uninstalled the 2 Greasemonkey scripts I use for GMail, so we'll see if it makes a difference. The automated response from the GMail support team now invites you to send in some information:

If you feel that access to this account should not have been disabled, please respond to the following questions: 1. List the date and time of day when you were locked out of the account. 2. What task were you performing when you were locked out? (ex: sending an email, downloading an attachment, etc.) 3. Has access to your account been disabled before this occurrence? If so, when and for how long? 4. Indicate which of the following, if any, Gmail features you use: POP, auto-forwarding, or Gmail's Notifier 5. Are you using any type of browser extensions? If so, please specify. 6. Do you use any third-party software in conjunction with Gmail? If so, please specify.

I responded, and not surprisingly, heard nothing back. Still no official or semi-official response from Google – all we can do is examine their automated responses and infer what we can. Or read tea-leaves. [Update 13th May 2005 – locked out again. I probably GMail open in a tab at home – sent email to Gmail support, received automated reply. Account will probably be unlocked in a few minutes – but if that tab is refreshing itself at home may well get locked out again very soon. This is really really boring, and surely fixable by Google without resorting to lockouts.] Oh – does anyone know of a decent Ajaxy opensource webmail solution ? I used to use SquirrelMail, but it does feel clunky now I'm used to GMail. I utterly hate being in the situation of loving the interface and the space of GMail yet feeling utterly helpless in the face of their automated decision making. I understand that GMail costs nothing, but surely this is brand-damaging ? Come on Google/Gmail, someone talk to me. Technorati Tags: gmail, gmail lockdown