Some days ago I received a message from Google that the Kanji Koohii email account was suspended. Thankfully as I signed in today and provided authentication, the account is back up.

Emails should be working again so if you tried "Forgot Password" you should be receiving those emails again.

I am not 100% sure but I believe the account may have been flagged because I naïvely used GMail SMTP to send the contact form messages. I noticed a spammy message one day, let's just say the person's email pointed to a very unsavoury domain. One way spammers get around filters is they put a relatively meaningless message but use the sender email to advertise a domain name.

Perhaps naïvely so, I figured I could just send the user's messages to myself with the free GMail SMTP. However on the relatively few occasions a spammer/spambot sends a bad message, it looks like I'm the one sending those messages to Google servers.

In order to make sure the account doesn't get flagged again I disabled the contact form. You can always reach me of course, the email address for feedback and account related questions is shown on the Contact page when you're signed in.

As an aside I used to look up suspicious IPs with a site called "countryipblocks" and it would give me the CIDR for the "range" of IPs this IP belongs to, and I used that to tweak the Apache access file. Lately this site doesn't respond to IP searches. Would anyone know an alternative?