Sorry for the non-diary, folks, but I'm wondering if gmail's problems last night have locked people out of their gmail accounts. Some details below.
I'm on dialup, and when I came online this morning I had been 'signed out' of gmail (and my iGoogle home page) -- although I didn't sign out and iGoogle should have opened up. Gmail wanted me to sign in, due to 'unusual' or 'suspicious' activity on my account. Yet the various means provided by google to resolve the problem did not work (I've tried 4-5 ways).
Eventually, I found the questionnaire provided by gmail { Accounts>Help Articles>Contacting Support>Contact Us; https://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/request.py?hl=en&contact_type=acc_reco&ara=2&ctx=acc_reco&rd=1 , although you may need to answer 'no' if there is only one question is on the screen }.
This questionnaire DID NOT RECOGNIZE my gmail username, and kept giving me an error message saying that the name could not include spaces etc -- which it does not.
At downrightnow.com, I found that gmail had three 'down' events within the last 24 hours (middle of the night Eastern time). Check it out: http://downrightnow.com/...
Not being a techno-geek, I have no idea where to look for current info on any problems that might be going on with gmail. The fact that the gmail questionnaire failed to recognize my username as being in a correct format suggests to me that the problem is bigger than just a glitch with my account.
Anyone else having problems with gmail today? Any suggestions?
UPDATE 8pm Eastern:
Both my mai;n & alternate gmails are working again. Had to have gmail send an authorization number to a friend with a mobile phone/text messaging. Apparently gmail doesn't know that their are still people using land-line phones for dialup.
Once gmail came up, I saw that about 9 spam-containing emails were sent to people on my contacts list from my main gmaiil address at about 4:31. Which is intriguing, since my computer was turned off at that time. So (apparently) those emails were sent from -- shall I call it a copy? -- a version of my gmail account that had to have been housed on a different computer. (I should say: 9 spam emails bounced back to me at 4:31. Who knows how many were sent?)
Well, I'll be updating my virus-checker and running it tonight.