Tuesday, June 10, 2008

gmail psa

Apparently if you send an email to around 500 recipients and several bounce, gmail's automatic anti-spam provisions will kick in and you won't be able to send email for around 24 hours. In telling friends and colleagues about my move to EMI I, of course, triggered this limit. Fortunately, gmail is working again now.

Interesting user experience lesson, though. If you rely on a free service that has no human support, what happens when the algorithm generates a false positive and locks you out? If Google had a "Pay $20 for help" button, I would have happily done that to resolve the issue. Hell, I would have paid $100 to fix it. Wonder if they're leaving money on the table?

3 comments:

Tim Allen / FlipperPA said...

Cory, I'd highly recommend switching to Google Apps. First off, you get the same interface as gmail, but with your own domain (cory@ondrejka.com?). Secondly, if you want to, you can go for premier support: $50 per year, and your 6 gig limit gets raised to 25 gigs, and you get support. Check it out here: Google Apps

Shakespere said...

Yes, no human help is the price to pay for probably the most amazing services you could ever get for free. I am surprised they even let you send out that many e-mails at once on a free account. Definitely look into the upgrade or some kind of listserv.

''''' said...

I agree fully with your post here. Unfortunately with a company as large as Google it doesn't seem on there to-do list to add a human help search or even one of those "Cisco Live person jobbies."