They have this policy in place but there is a difference between having a policy and actively enforcing it.

Not related to them wanting to do it / enforcing it, they might be required to have that in there for legal reasons.

Do you know how often the Skydrive policy is being actively enforced?

Of the millions of users, this is the first time I have heard of someone getting permanently banned. Have you seen other cases?

Thank you for pointing that out. Didn't notice that. Time to move away from gmail. It's not longer a FUD highlighting some clause saying "they can close your account". Because now they are actively closing user accounts.

This article is about Microsoft, I don't think there are examples of Google doing this. (Although there have been similar things in the past).

If you want to move away from gmail, who would you move to? I suspect that almost all services will have similar terms, so the only option would be to host your mail yourself. Even then, you probably can't use most hosting services to run the server.

The main issue with running an email server yourself is making sure you aren't caught as a false positive on spam filters.