Hello! I lost my Identity

I was on vacation with my family in South India, in the middle of nowhere. Cell phones worked hard to detect a signal. My Blackberry burnt more fuel in searching for networks, than doing something useful. Occasionally, we would come to some village head quarters or a town. We would feverishly call a few friends and check a few mails and that's it. The family outing was perfect. Enjoyable. None of the cell phone interruptions. No calls. Perfect.

In the cyberspace, something was going wrong. Really wrong for me. One of my friends sent me an SMS informing why I was spamming the mailboxes. A mail that talked about me buying an iPhone or some such garbage was the content of the email. I read the SMS and laughed it off.

My vacation ended and I was back at work. After being away for a week; things had piled up. When the backlog came down to manageable proportions, I logged on to my gmail account. It would not allow me to get it. I was certain I used the right password. It was really frustrating and I asked gmail to send me a new password. Bang came a response, that my account has been blocked and disabled. So many things that I do on the net has been intimately tied to email ids, that now I went around checking for places that used this email id. Picasso threw me out. Blogsot threw me out. Facebook came back saying that they have disabled the account. I lead my example. I was the first to be fired from Facebook; even before the "Quit FB Day". I have no regrets. FB has a Blackberry client that I had downloaded. I entered my user id and password. It came back saying "cannot connect to server". I was pretty upset and was actually joking to colleague that now FB has a Trojan horse on BB for trapping your login id / password. I am inclined to believe that this is where my miseries began. Anyways...

Twitter was decent; it allowed me to get in and change my email id. And my world came to a stand still. That made me work overtime to address the issue. I decided to spend an entire night ensuring that all the site and accounts I used had a valid email id. The single sign on had played a havoc in my life. 

I had filed close to 6 forms in all to Google explaining to them about the problem I was facing, Google did not respond. It appears that they did send a mail to my disabled email account. That was not a bit funny. In fact Google groups is filled with postings about disabled accounts and how people struggle to get help from Google to address their problems. In terms of Customer responsiveness - Google clearly gets an F-. It sucks.

I was back in Chennai this weekend - on a business visit. One other gmail account was disabled. I was livid. I went through the "ask for new password" cycle, this time Google threw up a new screen asking me for my cell phone number and country information. It send me an 6 digit code for verifying the account. We are used to these 6 digit OAC code menace, thanks for Citibank in India. I entered the code and suddenly things worked on that email id. I tried the same trick on my disabled account. I entered the cell phone / country info. Google sent me a code. I entered the code and bingo. The gmail account was enabled once again. Why Google disbaled my account [ possibly because of the email burst that was not started by me; why it chose to remain silent and no respond to my emails / notes and why caused it to enable the account without informing that it is now ready to do so - is a mystery to me.

It all seems surreal. In the meantime, I had created another email id on Microsoft Live and ensured that I move away from Google.

Moral of the Story: Keep away from any ecosystem that expects you to have single sign on. It is simply a recipe for a disaster that is waiting to happen. If you believe in having one, buy a domain and get Google to host the email for that domain. That was Google can simply refuse to host you, but you can always retain your email id by choosing a different service provider.

The last 2 weeks have been stressful indeed. I can sleep peacefully tonight.