Back in July I imported all of my old mail (from 1997 to 2003) into Gmail. Considering their policy of "don't delete, archive!" I figured this would be a good thing. Unfortunately, the way I imported the mail was less than ideal. I had 10,000 messages in my inbox and no easy way to archive them and mark them as read. Couldn't sort by date, because Gmail only lets you sort by "thread date", which is different from "message date". The message dates on the imported e-mails were correct. The thread dates were all in July. So I downloaded libgmail and wrote a script to search through my threads and delete the ones where no message in the thread was newer than 2003. The first mistake I made was that I did not wait between commands, so I promptly spammed Gmail with hundreds of page hits. Then my account was blocked for 24 hours. Okay, fair enough. I put a sleep in. Five seconds. Worked a bit longer, then blocked again. So I tried ten seconds between command... Took days to complete and I got blocked several times again.

So now I have maybe 3000 imported threads left in my archive, and my inbox is clean. My latest script sleeps TEN SECONDS between every Gmail pageload and I got blocked AGAIN. It also seems people are getting blocked for NORMAL USAGE. There are many advantages to using Gmail, but lately they've really been upsetting me. They block spam well and make it easy to search, but if they are going to keep preventing me from reading and manipulating my e-mail, I can no longer rely on them.

Even though it still sucks hard to run your own mail server.