To play devil's advocate - you willingly gave it to them, with almost zero contractual expectations. In a technical sense it is their stuff, and they have graciously implemented a feature allowing you to retrieve a copy of it.

I definitely agree that it's the "right" thing to do, but this kind of comment speaks of entitlement and lack of personal responsibility. They're offering a service, they don't have any inherent obligation, and you can choose not to use it.

Absolutely not. The implicit agreement is that they provide a service to hold, manage, and use your stuff, and you give up a certain amount of privacy by allowing them to see it - and they get to advertise at you while you use the service, and maybe make money in other ways off your information.

So in other words, it really is your stuff. Imagine if they locked your accounts from you out of malice - it's legal gray area, since I don't believe there have been any court cases, but I'm pretty sure the result would be obvious. You would easily be able to sue them to get back your access to it.

Why would you have the expectation of an implicit agreement? There is no implicit agreement, that's an unfounded assumption by the user.

I imagine they could completely shut down all unpaid gmail access at any moment with no legal implications (though I haven't read the fine print, and in that extreme case the courts would probably step in just to keep the country running smoothly).

What precedent is there to support your hypothetical lawsuit? I kind of disagree, they would just get a lot of negative PR.

If Google simply shut down Gmail, their stockholders would pretty much fire the entire leadership of the company. It would be professional suicide to approve something like that.

I wonder if Page, Brin and Schmidt (the majority stockholders) would fire Larry, Sergei and Eric.

There would certainly be a change of leadership due to the change in the business that shutting down gmail would cause. The PR hit would be huge, and I'd WAG that majority rule would not be enough to keep them in place.

Implementing exporting features takes time and money. If such things would come for free, then they would have an obligation.

Yes, it's your stuff and I don't agree with the parent. But you're not necessarily entitled to features for an easy export of that stuff. That's the kind of agreement that has to be explicit in order for you to feel entitled.

Anyway, if you want fair treatment and to feel like a customer and not a product, you should pay for using it. I'm on Google Apps, I have my own domain and email address, I can always move, I don't get adds, I can use the Exchange protocol, I have more options for importing/exporting and the email support has been very responsive for me. From what I hear Office 365 is a solid option lately and there's also FastMail.fm and others.

And btw, allowing them to advertise in your Inbox does not make you the customer, you're just a user of free stuff. And free stuff is great, but not when you depend on it (unless it's open-source :))

I have ambivalent feelings too but more in a gracious sense. I have long hold the philosophy that data should be treated as a consumer's personal property. Companies have reasonable rights to refuse to serve but they shouldn't be given authority to confiscate consumer's personal property and close their accounts unless warranted by the law of the land.

I am paying them for this so I expect more.

You can expect what they've laid out in the contract you agreed to.

What? Yes, there is, that's what "loan" means.

It's only because data does not have legal status as property. It doesn't keep people from feeling a similar degree of ownership over the data they store with Google et al, though, and I think it points to a democratic desire for these data-retrieval acts and implementations to be more than goodwill. The third-party doctrine is only a convention, after all.

Agreed but it takes time, effort and money to make sure that you can take your stuff with you.

Yes, after all, you already could access your email via imap and do the backup by yourself.

Until you get the "lockdown in sector 4" error message and have to sit in the timeout corner to start again. It took me over 48 hours to actually download all my mail out of gmail. (about two years ago.)

Have you actually tried? There is throttling in place, meaning it can take ages depending on your account size.

My mom couldn't. Nor about 95% of the rest of my friends and family. But clicking export and then download? All of them can do that.

Really? Every email application I've used in the past few years asks for your name / email address / password on the first wizard-page. They automatically detect gmail, hook everything up, and start downloading without any further steps.

Yes, to the point that it is very easy to crash Thunderbird if you blindly hook it into your GMail account.

I've never had that problem. I have plenty of other annoyances with Thunderbird (so much that I'm paying for what's essentially a custom UI), but it's usually stable. It hasn't complained when I've hooked up a half-dozen accounts, collectively about a half-million emails, and it did everything reasonably quickly.

Hmmm... not seeing the same behavior today. There have been upgrades in the meantime, of course, but I doubt that this was addressed. Must have been something off that day. It did run off and start downloading the header of every single message in my GMail account, which I would rather it didn't as I really only care about the mail that I have received recently (I only use Thunderbird for encrypted emails but the web interface otherwise). That is still annoying, but since I don't want to bad mouth people with false information:

Let the record show that Thunderbird no longer becomes unresponsive for me when accessing my GMail account, must have been a glitch on that day when I first set up GMail in Thunderbird.

haha, I don't mean to imply that it's impossible that it did that, just that it shouldn't be normal :) usually bugs like that are fixed pretty quickly, especially for something as widely-used as gmail.

That's exactly why this thing is useful and appreciated.