What would you do if you woke up and your email account was closed?

I started using gmail a while ago and gradually over time I have stopped giving people the email addy that is through one of my own sites and instead I just give them my gmail address. All my other emails get redirected there anyway so it is just easier..

gmailSo now my gmail account has my life in it, all my business emails, receipts, contacts from customers and links to cat videos. So what would I do if that shut down? Someone mentioned on Twitter that their Google accounts had all been shut down and it made me think what would I do if the same thing happened to me..

  • Panic
  • Cry
  • Scream
  • Blame Google
  • Beg for it back
  • Rant
But what if Google don’t respond or just keep telling me “you broke the rules, no we wont tell you which one, no we wont reinstate”.
So I am out of luck..now what..
I read a article recently that talked about how 20% of business that have a major data failure are out of business within 2 years
Sure I would start again, yes i would redirect my main domain email to somewhere else but what about all those people who have my gmail address? What would happen when they tried to email me and got a bounced email.. Not good for my business.
I decided to post this to my Facebook page at - http://www.facebook.com/PaulForceySoftware
and I got some good info from the old codger (his description not mine) Lane Lester - http://www.facebook.com/PaulForceySoftware/posts/168338173238746
I followed the steps and now have got all my gmail emails set to back up to Thunderbird on my pc.
Now if I am doing that I suppose I could go back to having some of my product emails go straight through to Thunderbird but that is for another day.
Tim left a comment that mentioned a program called Mailstore home – http://www.mailstore.com/en/mailstore-home.aspx and he said he uses it for backing up gmail. I haven’t tried it yet but will download tonight and see how it goes, if anyone else knows of any programs that will do it please do let me know.
If you use email for business you need to have some way to back it up and make sure that you do not wake up one day to find it is gone. The method linked to above is no cost and it seems to be working for me. It was quick to set up and is explained in decent depth, really not to technical at all. I am reasonably sure it would work if you used Yahoo or any of the other free email accounts.
Good luck and I hope that none of us wake up dead email accounts but just in case it is worth taking some precautions.
Paul Forcey
Oh and dont forget to look at the new look Rank Tracker site , we are now on 1.9 and have just done some updates. We have more planned but that will be another email..