I also suspect of a problem with my credit card.
But Google refuses to tell me what was wrong.
Marvel at the simplicity: you pay for a service, and the provider's incentive is to serve you!
This versus the alternative where you use a "service" provided free of cost, and the "provider" makes money by selling data they have harvested from your interactions. You give away your privacy; you have no reason to expect support; you are not actually the customer.
Email is so vital to my personal life and my business that it is worth paying 50 bucks a year.
However like any service when it comes to your business read the TOS and the contract very well. Basing your business on "free" services is never a good idea, a paid contract usually gives you some sort of protection and better terms than "provided as is".
I could use an ISP (or in my case university) email, but I'll lose access to that in the future when I change ISPs (or graduate).
I could use <other free email provider>, but they will probably have the same problem, and unless I'm using one of the other giant services (e.g. outlook) are probably more likely to disappear than Google is to randomly ban me.
I could use a paid provider, but they are probably still more likely to disappear in the future than google is likely to randomly ban me.
Instead I would prepare to mitigate the damage of losing access to your account. Have local copies of emails, don't use two factor authentication with one factor being email.
That was my main reason to still use Gmail till today.
From now I'll be making regular backups, and always use an email address on my own domain, so I can freely change provider without much problems.
Being condescending with customers may backfire for them
Features for the curious:
- 2 GB email account
- 100% green electricity
- Saved data can be encrypted data
- Two-factor auth
- Ad-free
- Sign up without personal details
I'm not related with them in any way, just a customer. The only con is that you can't use your own domain.
What's far more interesting is that their tech support actually answers. It may take a day or three but they do talk back.
(A paid provider might make them too, but has more incentive to care and fix them. + I suspect they actually have less automatic abuse filtering, because free offerings are more vulnerable to that)
What email provider should I use?
Gmail is a large-scale impersonal system / organization. In every other walk of life, we see such large organizations making mistakes, for essentially inscrutable reasons.
Why would Gmail / Google be any different? The onus is on you to show that, rather than the OP to prove he's above reproach / faultless.
