Don’t Use Free Email Address. Ever

This is how I lost my Gmail, and why YOU should avoid it.

Like probably 80% of the webmasters I have been using the free gmail as my primarily address. Not because it’s free, but because it’s really convenient and easy to use, I love the G0notiier and the interface.. Anyway, I just loved it. This email address was bound to domains, various licenses, WP-databases and served me well for 3 years.

One day, it got hacked.

Lions’ share of private data, passwords, contacts list and about 100,000 important emails accumulated over the past 3 years ended up in someone’s hands. So, you would suggest password recovery? Tried that, but the only way to recover your password is to have the password sent to your secondary email address, which yet again was free hotmail account that expired somewhere in 2005. Or, the second option is to submit a complain that your account was compromised, or answer the secret question.

Submitting a complaint about a widely offered free service online that is provided without warranty — is cute. They automatically send you 20 questions to answer and then they would investigate. Some questions are pretty amazing. For instance, what was the verification code you received when creating your GMail? Assuming I created my gmail over 3 years ago and the verification code was sent TO my gmail address which I can no longer access, I really wonder if ANYONE ever managed to answer this question. But there are more, such as date you created your gmail on, date you last changed your password, etc. You ought to have a pretty good memory to provide all this information, and even if you do, your complain is forwarded to the Google Support Team.

Forget about your email in the next month or so. When you are Adwords advertiser, you get an answer within 12 hours, when you are Adsense publisher you get assisted within 48 hours and when you an annoying Gmail user that sucks up on their server’s bandwidth for free AND now complains — time frame could be rather flexible.

In my case, eventually it all came down to answering the secret question which I knew for sure. No one on the planet, except me, knew the answer, not even family or friends, not to mention online buddies. I never written it anywhere and I must say I was shocked when the answer I provided turned to be incorrect. How’s that? Simply, the person who took over my account most likely changed the answer (leaving the same question). As a result Google is very sorry but if I can’t log in and cannot answer my secret question correctly, they are unable to provide further assistance.

3 years of various correspondence, files, clients, calendar events, passwords and tons of other valuable data is lost, because free stuff are always provided without warranty, and you cannot complain when losing it.

Conclusion?

If you have a domain name (and that only costs $8!), use an email that is bound to your domain because with freebies you get what you paid for and if you have even a few semi-important emails in your inbox, they sure worth paying $0.60/month for. I still love gmail and if they were to offer a paid version of their service I would have definitely upgraded, but for now, I am not ready to risk my emails again. I still don’t even know WHO did it.

UPDATE: On January 22nd, 20 days after the accident, my email was restored and Google apologized for the inconvenience. At least I have something to do for the next few days, going over my 150+ new emails and making sure the other 376,500+ read ones were not abused.