just a little warning to anyone who uses Google Apps (free) accounts

This morning I woke up to my email being blocked. My account is the main Admin account but it was blocking me and not letting me in no matter how many password resets I tried.

Thankfully my brother is also an Admin on the account so i managed to use his account to get into the Domain Control Panel...this then highlighted the major issue that overnight my account has been disabled due to "Google Account disabled due to suspicious activity"

Because this is a Google Apps free account there is NO support what so ever. No email, no phone number. No easy way to try and get the account back. You can post on a forum and hope but thats about it.

The block is across the whole account so email, contacts, drive, picasa, etc so all those where I had data I have now potentially lost.

Luckily my emails are backed up in Thunderbird. If the account is not unlock in the next day I only have 2 options

1) Change my email address to a new one - this is a pain - i have had it for 7+ years.

2) Move back to my ISP which will be a bit of hastle as the rest of the family now use this including the calender / contacts etc.

Very interesting.

This sort of thing is why I try to put off people at work from using 'free' services for work. If it's free you've no comeback at all if anything goes wrong.

In fact I wish it would happen to some of them, they need a wake up call.