Google locked me out of my gmail account

[rajee]

It turns out Google doesn't like its users getting digests of mail.
Just recently I got an "Unusual Usage" screen which said my account is disabled up to 24 hours. I sent their "Lockdown" crew an email via hotmail and I got a form letter reply stating ...
It will take between one minute and 24 hours for you to regain access,
depending on the behavior our system detected.

Your account may be temporarily disabled if, among other things, you are:

- sending or receiving an excessive volume of mail
- using any third-party software that automatically logs in to your
account and is not supported by Gmail
- using certain browser extensions that change the behavior of a website
(Greasemonkey, a popular Firefox extension, often interferes with Gmail.
We suggest disabling Greasemonkey to use Gmail without any issues.)

For your protection, we ask that you disable any non-supported software
before accessing Gmail again.

All I was using was Firefox's gmail notifier and I had changed my reply notification for Silly Stuff forum to weekly digest instead of immediate notification.

For all the gmail users, be careful that you dont send/receive excessive emails. I believe that is what caused it for me. 🙁
)🙁

 

[Nige]

What is defined as excessive emails?

 

[rajee]

I think they mean excessive number of emails at 1 time. They made this policy to stop spammers from sending massive amount of email to others.

The email reply did not state what excessive meant but I presume if their is a dramatic change in either the number of emails per day, either individually or in a
digest of emails, that you receive or send eg 100 emails to 500.


Mainly, I believe the Google staff are looking for emailing behaviour changes. I think they correlate excessive number of emails sent or received to be a spammer or a victim of massive spamming.