Google Slightly More Evil Than Previously Thought

Mehran Khalili commented on my post about forwarding and Google’s business model in a post titled “Gmail And ‘Don’t Be Evil'”. Basically, he agrees with me – which is nice. But he also said:

So I’ve lost about a year’s worth of email as punishment for not logging in [to Hotmail] regularly enough. Somehow I doubt Google would do that to me.

Don’t be so sure. The timeout is nine months rather than 30 days, but it’s there.

In related news, I noticed that the “Does Gmail support Safari?” answer in the Help contains a cheeky plug for Firefox…

2 thoughts on “Google Slightly More Evil Than Previously Thought

  1. Hotmail’s timeout used to be longer before they got so popular and started cutting things.

    Gmail might say 9 months at the moment, but in their terms of service they reserve the right to change the service however they want and whenever they want, as well the right to terminate your account at any time for any reason (or no reason).

    If you want a guaranteed level of service, pay for a service with terms that you can accept.

  2. I wonder if Google sends you a warning before deleting your account and whether this warning mail (if there is any) is forwarded to your external account if autoforwarding is set.