Dave’s Rants

So I spent all week praising Google and their new cool services, but now I have to complain about getting shut out of my email account. This afternoon I went to check my account, as I’ve done a number of times today, so I went to the tab I left open in Firefox and clicked on a mail I wanted to read.

I got a Javascript popup with an error telling me to try again later, I’ve gotten these in the past so I just tried again but got another Javascript popup. So I decided just to enter the Gmail URL again and was greeted with the following error message.

If you click on the image you’ll be able to read the text, but I’ll quote it here anyway.

Our system indicates unusual usage of your account. In order to protect Gmail users from potentially harmful use of Gmail, this account has been disabled for up to 24 hours.

If you are using any third party software that interacts with your Gmail account, please disable it or adjust it so that its use complies with the Gmail Terms of Use. If you feel that you have been using your Gmail account according to the Terms of Use or otherwise normally, please contact us at gmail-lockdown@google.com to report this problem

Now that’s a bit of a shock for anyone, so naturally considering I wasn’t using any 3rd party apps, I emailed Google to complain.

Hi,

I just recieved a message that my account had been disabled for a period of up to 24 hours. Your system apparently indicated unusual usage of my account but I can’t see what I’ve done wrong.

My email address is davidoneill [at] gmail.com. I was attempting to open a message when I got a Javascript Application error, saying that ‘the system was unable to complete the task, try again’ or something to that effect. So I attempted to do it again, this time it failed also. So at this point I attempted to reload the Gmail URL from scratch and that resulted in me getting an ‘Unusual Usage’ page.

Can you please tell me what is going on. The only new thing I’m using in conjunction with my Google account is the ‘Google Search History’ tool that was launched on Wednesday.

Regards,
David O’Neill

Now it would have been nice to get a proper reply, but instead I got a copied and pasted one.

Hello,

Our system has detected unusual usage of your Gmail account. For your
protection, we have temporarily disabled all access to your account.

If you suspect that the unusual usage of your account has been caused by a third party, we recommend that you change your password and secret question once you are able to log back in to Gmail. You should be able to access your account again within 24 hours.

If you are using any software that automatically logs in to your account, or automatically sends and receives messages, we ask that you disable the software before accessing Gmail again. Please note that the use of such third-party software is not supported by Gmail.

Sincerely,

The Gmail Team

So that wasn’t very informative at all. I’ve emailed them again, pointing out that it’s impossible for me to not make the same mistake again since I don’t know what I did wrong in the first place!

Update (1:14 23-4-2004): Having gone out for the evening I was happy to come back and have my Gmail working properly! Of course I still don’t know what ‘I did wrong’ so I can’t prevent it happening again.