How Sending an Email to Our Elected Official resulted in Gmail disabling my account

You wake up and you check your inbox — and on the top you see a notification from Gmail that your Google account, which you rely on for a lot of things, is no longer accessible.

That’s what happened to me almost a month ago, on a Monday morning

Reason? Google stated my email was used to send unwanted content. I was startled, I started thinking about any apps / sites I connected my account with which may have gone rogue and ended up sending spam using access to my Gmail account.

However I could not remember any such instance. Now I was not even able to access my account to check the Sent section of my email to see what were the last emails I sent.

Thankfully it clicked that I might still be able to access the last synced emails on my phone and I was able to. In the Sent emails this was the email I found

And this was it. This was the only email in my Sent box (at least what was last synced, and my email was synced daily).

Reason is that this account is not my primary email for communication and is mainly linked to my PayPal and bank accounts and I rarely used it to send outgoing emails.

The content of this email?

What’s this all about? The email in this screenshot is an appeal to our elected official (India) where I have written (not exactly, this is copied from a campaign and is a pre-written email) — nevertheless it is an appeal from the citizens to their elected official and I agree to every word of it.

The campaign: https://indiawantscrypto.net/

And what I believe may have happened is hundreds of thousands if not millions of people may have participated in this widespread campaign and used the same email content to send to their elected official all across the country — and Google’s brillian spam detection system caught and marked it as such, not only that but it ended up disabling accounts.

But that’s okay, systems do make error. However, I sent an appeal, 2 days passed, no response, another one, again 2 days passed and nothing. And now it’s been 26 days. My email is still disabled I might be missing important emails from my banks and there’s no care for it on Google’s end.

What does one free Gmail account matter to the Internet Giant? Right?

Perhaps it is us who have ended up relying too heavily on these free to use services (not entirely free, we give them consent to sell us ads, and that’s how they earn money)

I am thinking that going the other path, that is to update my emails on my bank accounts would have been much more faster and wise decision.

It’s time the big tech make it right. They may as private companies not have any obligations to keep providing services — especially when in their ToS it is clearly told to us (which we never read) that they may suspend our access to their services for ANY REASON. If my hair were blue then they could have disabled my account and stated they disabled it because my hair were blue and there’s nothing I could have done, now that doesn’t happen, it’s a far fetched thought but it’s a possibility — my advice: Don’t color your hair blue. Any other color may work.