That argument assumes that Google email is crap. It isn't, it is the best email client I've used (online or off), and they have every right to be proud of it.
Does it break sometimes? Sure. What doesn't?
Does that make it a smelly pile of crap? I don't think it does, and I don't think most people would agree that it is.
Gmail is a really awesome service that doesn't have the best support. Period. If people can't be bothered to look at the terms, or if they have greater expectations of the service than they should well, that's on them. I don't think circumstances are so dire that they should plaster "Really, we suck" on their homepage, especially as they're better than all their competition that I've seen.
Well correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you have maintained that since it's a free service one should not expect reliable access or even a dime to be spent in dire circumstances outside your control; and you have further argued that Google is telling us the same thing in the terms (however inefficient the medium).
If it is or were the case, that Gmail is not even supposed to be reliable, then might be very pretty and convenient as you please (hence, not a smelly pile of crap, as one might believe from the terms) but still ultimately bad for most people. Particularly the people who are least equipped to judge the risks or recover from the mistake, because IMAP is Greek to them.
So even as apology for Google I think this is a fruitless line of argument, no disrespect intended. I do respect your opinions.
My own feelings are more nuanced than what I think you are probably fighting hardest against (round condemnation of Google as evil, or Gmail as unusable). I personally think there are safe and constructive uses for Gmail, cigarettes, hard liquor, cars, pornography and pistols and informed adults should have ready access to all these. But I think as a matter of personal conscience it's better not to be a dick, and it's better long-term business, and I'm not against leverage being applied to make Google iron out this procedure or be more firmly up-front with the scary disclaimers that probably should be scaring away people who are not wise consenting adults. Again assuming that Gmail is operating on this sort of Libertarian-style principle that they are not even slightly and socially obligated to provide reliable service no matter how much they promote the product for wide and general use.
In the interest of clarification, my hardheaded response originated from classifying 'lack of support' as evil. That was my bone, and now it's pretty much picked clean.
I do happen to think that Gmail is an exceptionally good mail service, though that is obviously just my opinion. I think statistics would agree that it is a fairly reliable service. Reliable enough that it doesn't need to be disclaimed as "We're just messing around here really" on the home page. Nor am I willing to necessarily concede that it is 'bad for most people'.
In a nutshell, I would say that it's a great service if you can agree with its terms. This isn't mail that people are generally paying tons of money for, and I think their expectations are out of sync with reality. The general argument I hear is "BUT MY LIFE IS IN THAT EMAIL". If that's the case, gmail wasn't probably the email service you were supposed to be using, at least not for free, in the same way I don't store my valuables under the rock in the garden. If it mattered that much, you shouldn't have entrusted it to a service that didn't have a support policy more in line with your expectations.
I have gmail, and I'll concede that it would be inconvenient if they turned off my access tomorrow, but I keep all my more pressing correspondence to services that I have a good-faith belief will give a shit if I lose my information. If google apps were shutting people off, I would expect people to be upset, and I would not consider that ire as meritless.
My only real complaint with the post you've just made is the assertion that Google doesn't care to provide any service whatsoever. If they didn't care about providing reliable service, then it probably wouldn't be so reliable. I personally have experienced maybe two or three outages since I joined the Beta however many years ago. Those were global outages, or at least wide-spread. That sort of thing generally doesn't happen any more. In addition, it's not as though swarms of people are having their accounts disconnected every day. We keep bandying about the 99% number, but I really suspect that it's probably more like 99.99%, but that .01% is enough people that we still hear about it.
Some of this is opinion, and some of my argument is diminished by Google's people support in general, but I think it's getting short shrift because of these rare occasions, and I think that it's considered on the same scale as when Paypal freezes someone's account, which I think is unfair.
Does it break sometimes? Sure. What doesn't?
Does that make it a smelly pile of crap? I don't think it does, and I don't think most people would agree that it is.
Gmail is a really awesome service that doesn't have the best support. Period. If people can't be bothered to look at the terms, or if they have greater expectations of the service than they should well, that's on them. I don't think circumstances are so dire that they should plaster "Really, we suck" on their homepage, especially as they're better than all their competition that I've seen.