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Be Careful with Google or You Might Get Blacklisted

Read the terms carefully!

By Vlad Constandes, SEO News Editor

10th of January 2008, 08:59 GMT

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I covered this a while ago when it happened to some Gmail users that were blocked out of their accounts because of their using the IMAP feature a little aggressively. The matter settled back then with an apologetic mail and return of control to the people left without their addresses.

It's often that one or the other discovers that web applications have some limitations that have not been disclosed before and it's almost the rough

way that this comes to be found. Even the "smallest" program has one or two of these limit thingies that you just bump your head into, and then you don't know what hit you and why the service you used constantly and full heartedly is denying you access.

The story of Ran Barton is a classic example of the above: "Back on December 20, I wrote about my frustration with Google Notebook, which I use every day as a way to archive much of what I read online (...). For some off reason, it seemed like Google Notebook was down, and yet I could find no other description of the issue online, which made me think I must be mad."

Can you guess what the problem was? Read again carefully the part with the "aggressive use" of the service, in case you haven't guessed it yet. Later, Ran received a message from Google that explained it all: "Your account was accidentally blacklisted by a blacklisting heuristic that looked at total size of notebook information. We've revised the heuristic, so you shouldn't be accidentally blacklisted again in the future."

That's not a very comfortable thing to be doing, if you had to, giving up a habit that does nobody wrong, is it? Luckily for him, the problem was solved without him having to cut back on the archiving (the habit I mentioned), but many aren't such good friends with Fortuna, so you too should be careful with what you use Google for, because you might find yourself empty handed down the road.

TAGS:

google news | google | notebook | blacklist

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Comment #1 by: Ran Barton on 18 Jan 2008, 18:08 GMT	reply to this comment
Hi. Thanks for covering this. My original post on the matter is here: http://rbiii.wordpress.com/2008/01/08/google-notebook-blacklist/

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