Lockdown in sector 4!

I got this weird message when trying to get my Gmail today:

Our system indicates unusual usage of your account. In order to protect Gmail users from potentially harmful use of Gmail, this account has been disabled for up to 24 hours.

If you are using any third party software that interacts with your Gmail account, please disable it or adjust it so that its use complies with the Gmail Terms of Use. If you feel that you have been using your Gmail account according to the Terms of Use or otherwise normally, please contact us at gmail-lockdown@google.com to report this problem.

This is quite disturbing because I don’t use any “third party software”. I download my email through Mozilla ThunderBird and that’s it; nothing else and I only use Gmail as a filter for all my email – I love their spam filter. I don’t really use my Gmail email address for anything so it was a real surprise when I got this message; it makes me start to doubt Gmail’s reliability; it is free ya know. But I don’t want to use a service which has the potential of locking me out when I need my emails most. I have my professional emails routing through Gmail as a filter then it forwards those emails to me.

I do have a spam filter on my domain … if Google is starting to get like that, I’ll just bite the bullet and use that. Damn Google. I hope you’re not about to change after you *invited* all these people to use Gmail. It was Yahoo!’s lockout feature (and the inundation of spam) that caused me to stop using them for email too.

And most of all … I HOPE MY DAMN EMAILS ARE STILL THERE IF THEY AREN’T I AM GOING TO BE SORELY PISSED!!!

I host my web site on Godaddy. I would just as soon just buy more space for emails than deal with a free Gmail account that they feel they can disable whenever they see fit.