Jon Udell: Gmail lockdown in sector 4: "By the time Rob reminded me that I'd screwed up, there were a lot of messages to download. And I had a pretty good idea what would happen when I tried. Sure enough, about a tenth of the way through the process, I triggered the dreaded lockdown in sector 4. As those who have been there know, the message you receive (on your primary email account) reads in part:
Our system has detected abnormal usage of your Gmail account. As a result,
we have temporarily disabled access to this account.
It will take between one minute and 24 hours for you to regain access,
depending on the behavior our system detected.
As infuriating as this is, I know where they're coming from. When I helped design an online book service we wrestled with the same issue: how do you distinguish acceptable interactive use from unacceptable robotic use? There's no good solution. You measure quantity, you measure rate, you look at patterns, and you draw the line somewhere, but it's arbitrary.
In my case, access was restored in about two hours. I've throttled back my archiver, and it looks like a slow scan will do the job, but before I proceed I thought I'd pose two questions. First, if somebody out there has already worked out the lockdown algorithm, can you share the parameters?"
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