Coffent S.

I recall that in the early days of Google, a staff member suggested as a corporate motto, "Don't be evil". With Gmail, I fear that reasonable motto has been forgotten.

A couple of months ago I set up a Gmail account and used it for a few days to communicate with acquaintances before leaving on a trip to Italy. While attempting to send an email home to my family I got a message from Google that they had detected "suspicious activity" on my account and I must respond to a message sent to my cell phone. I didn't have cell phone access in Italy so there was no way I could comply with their request. However it really didn't make any difference because a couple of minutes later Google shut down my service, claiming I had violated unspecified terms of service. (All I had done since opening the account was send and receive perhaps 20 personally-addressed emails.) They provided an email address to which I should write if I disagreed with what they did. I wrote - three times over a space of four days - but they never responded. I scrambled to set up an account with another email provider, but how many email messages I missed in the interim I'll never know.

When I got back home I wrote a (postal) letter to Google's corporate headquarters asking for an explanation. Their response? None.

My complaint with Google is not for mistakenly determining a "terms of service" violation - they need to guard against violations and we all make mistakes. But to lure people into accepting a service, then without warning shutting it off when they most need it, *and* refusing to even acknowledge their subsequent entreaties, let alone respond to them - THAT is evil!

I can't speak to the quality of PeggyBank's film processing, but only to that of their customer service. I bought a Groupon coupon to use their service and, because the offer was stated ambiguously, thought the money could be used slightly differently than what they said it could be when I tried to apply the coupon. When I asked the owner (politely) why I couldn't apply the money differently, instead of answering he basically told me to take my business elsewhere. I did. Fortunately Groupon gave me a full refund as a result.