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Comment by x1798DE | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's possible to make a Google account without a phone number anymore. It's really unfortunate, especially because I deliberately don't set up fallback contacts for my "alternate" gmail accounts, and Google keeps locking them as suspicious when I log in from a second location, and I need to "verify" with a phone number any time that happens (at which point I abandon the account).

I understand that they want to fight spam, but I'd be willing to spend 5 minutes doing captcha type activities in exchange for not requiring a phone number, and that should pretty severely rate limit account creation.

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I've several children, and can no longer make Google accounts for their Chromebooks. All the phone numbers I have and control can no longer be used to register further accounts.

What happens to users that buy a new Android cell phone who's number has been burned by Google?

You should be aware that Google has minimum age requirements. I was not aware of this and my son disclosed his age to Google as part of setting up another Google service, which then locked out his account.

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1350409?hl=en

I switched to Fastmail after that.

Google's subject to U.S. law, they can't knowingly maintain a child's personal data without parental consent (which is a manual process). There are also further restrictions on the types of marketing they can do to children. It is fine if the product, like gmail, doesn't target children and they don't collect age info, but once they do know age they've got to either get consent (costly) or shut down the account.

That's okay with me and I wasn't criticizing Google, just stating what happened. My recollection was that I was able to get the account re-activated by providing a CC #, but once I was aware it was in violation of the ToS, I switched to a different provider.

Ironically you could create google voice numbers as a workaround

IIRC Google doesn't allow using Google Voice numbers for account verification (or other known VOIP number blocks).

One workaround is to use a number and then port it to Google Voice.

This is the time to get to know https://mail.yandex.com

Seriously, the interface is so much better than todays gmail, its astonishing. There is no spam either, and no ads.

The email account is not the issue; I run my own email server with all the fun that brings.

It's that the Chrome Books really need separate Google accounts otherwise, settings + notifications to end up replicated to all of them.

And yes, I have a greater than average number of children. I feel as if the only way forward is to purchase a google for business account, and add them all there :-/

Install a different Linux distro on them?

Anyone have any experiences with their support?

I think the main issue is that google doesn't accept certain senders anymore. As a generic thread about running a mailserver/mail service pops up here often.

That means users are shoveled into about one of 4 "acceptable" providers which have control of the entire market. They demand, full name and usually gender, mobile, alternative email and more.

So you get pushed into their information pipeline to stop "spam".

Yep, I wrote one not too long ago:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made-...

I've been meaning to write a follow up after I met some MailChip devs at a conference. They told me at MailChip they have to slowly spin up new servers, sending e-mail through them slowly so Google registers their new SMTP IPs.

The other thing they told me: MailChip owns a /A, and can therefore separately out their servers from even being remotely related to any spammy subnets (common problem on 'cloud' hosting).

I'm wondering if I heard/remember that correctly. I mean, a class A is huge and would be crazy expensive. I've been looking through websites on ASNs and am trying to figure out how to verify that info.

(Assuming you mean MailChimp)

I don't know anything about how MailChimp operates, but a quick search turns up this blog post about how to set up SPF records [1].

From there, you can get a list of which IPs MailChimp authorizes as a sender; following the SPF include directive, you can see they specify two IPv4 ranges, both of which are in class C space, so it seems unlikely that MailChimp has their own class A for SMTP senders.

[1]: https://blog.mailchimp.com/senderid-authentication-for-your-...

Yeah, we do something similar, although we send a much smaller amount of email than MailChimp.

Our admin runs about 10% of the outgoing mail through our DR site to keep google et al trained to accept emails from those IPs.

It accepts my personal mail server just fine. You need to support encryption, spf, and dkim but mail will flow no problem to gmail users in my experience.

Not mine, FWIW. Ten out of ten score on mail-tester.com, a clean IP that I acquired 15 years ago ... and further, gmail watches people daily remove my one-to-one correspondence from their spam folders.

And yet, most (but not all) new gmail recipients will not see my emails until they remove them from their spam folder.

Google does not want people to self-provide email and there is no incentive for them to do so.

dnsbl.info reports that 69.43.165.11, MX for mail.rsync.net, is blacklisted by ips.backscatterer.org:

http://www.backscatterer.org/?ip=69.43.165.11

I suggest fixing your SMTP server configuration [1][2] and maybe listing your IP on dnswl.org. (edit: I see you did the latter.)

[1]: http://www.backscatterer.org/index.php?target=bounces

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20140215064312/http://spamlinks....

That's the rsync.net mailserver and that's interesting, thank you.

However I was speaking of my own, personal mailserver, which is not listed.

Also - do we really think "big email" (like google) are using either of these (blacklist or whitelist) services ?

I can't tell you what goes on behind the scenes at Google, but I have resolved email issues to gmail by getting removed from blacklists.

It certainly could be an issue, but honestly even if it were possible to set up my own mail server, that's even worse for pseudonymity than a google account because ICANN records are public and I'd be the only one using my domains. It would make it much easier for some random person to uniquely identify me, which is a worse threat than Google identifying me by my phone number. This is one of those situations where anonymity loves company.

Also, the problem is not limited to e-mail. There are some non-email services from Google. I'd be perfectly happy to sign up for a Google account where you can't send e-mails, or where you can only send e-mails to people who have sent you e-mails.

> ICANN records are public and I'd be the only one using my domains

Several domain registration services and hosting providers offer to mask your whois information by making themselves the point of contact. Some include this as part of your package; Tiger Technologies does this as a free opt-in. Namecheap offers it as a paid add-on via WhoisGuard.

When is the last time you tried? I have created a gmail account couple of weeks back without providing phone number and recovery email.

I did it. Then they banned it.

Having my phone number or any other hard identifier is none of Googles business.

I have a google account without a phone number, but it's always been that way so they probably aren't going to ban me... I hope at least until I finish migrating

They do that if:

1. You don't log in from a first world IP (the terminology from their user operations team), but previous logins were from them.

2. You registered from an IP in a country where they don't have access to sending SMS, but they go to a country where they have.

3. Bot detection algo flagged you, and bot detection algo are one of their crown jewels that they don't tell to support people.

They could lock you out of your account and require your number before letting you log in again. Any day.

Happened to me.

They didn't ban your account for not having a phone number.

What else? I was creating this for Youtube videos for my son. When we were about to upload a video, it was already banned.

I dunno, but you weren't banned for not having a phone number attached to your account, because I and many others have accounts without phone numbers and are not banned.

It may depend on the time frame and geolocation. I tried to do this about 6 months ago.

I have also an old account that does not have a phone number and it is functional.

What I was describing was a creation of a new account.

I'm not Google customer support, but I'll repeat for a third time; you were not suspended because you didn't provide a phone number.

I think you've made your opinion clear. Why continue to try pushing it as fact? There are a thousand factors at play in spam/fraud/whatever detection, how can you possibly say with a straight face that you're certain the phone number is not a leading reason?

It may be that this persons knows something more that we do not (does not seem to be the case) or has very different experience.

I do not mind this. It is indeed possible that the cause of the ban originated from some other source as from entered personal details and sequence of actions.

It actually motivates me to create another experiment.

While this statement will be really buried, it reminds me that we still should be thankful that we can somewhat conceal our identity as a private enterprise can be much more unforgiving that the state.

From what I can tell from a few days ago, you can't create a new account without a phone number.

From just now, I went to gmail.com and created a new account without entering a phone number or email address.

I then went to Youtube and uploaded a video.

I signed out, then in again. Google asked for a number and recovery email, but let me press "Done" without providing one.

I'll sign in later from a different IP, and see what happens.

Edit: I've come across [1], which says a phone number is required to upload videos longer than 15 minutes to YouTube, or in some cases to upload anything.

[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/171664

It's not my opinion, it is fact. There was a reason he was suspended, and it is not his phone number not being attached to his account.

Also, I didn't say anything about leading reason.

> it is fact

No, it's a hasty generalization[1] where personal experience is assumed to match other cases.

Of course Google could have simply stated the reason for the suspension clearly, if they weren't so reliably opaque in support and service management issues,

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasty_generalization

So perhaps you will care to elaborate this a bit more?

So who are you then? :)

But I am willing to create another more controlled experiment.

I'm concerned about your ability to control the necessary variables. For example, any one of your anti-tracking measures (you're big into Internet privacy, yes?) may be triggering the suspension.

My only concern in that point of time was giving out the phone number, as it will give Google an unique identifier without the ISP and state cooperation. As such I did not use any additional measures.

I am grateful of your comments as it will motivate me to give it another try.

Btw. in fact I do not use regularly any anti tracking measurements. I am only protecting the local businesses against their own stupidity.

I really would like to keep visiting my favorite supermarket regardless of their decision to include their video ads into the Youtube videos I happen to watch time to time. Some careless fools already lost me as an client, I would not like to let this happen again.

Do you disagree with their right to specify the terms of use as to include a phone number, or do you just not like the rule?

I think that giving such agencies the power to identify unique individuals is not beneficial for the humankind.

I did it recently, and burned myself, because I forgot my password and had no way of recovering the account. As far as I know, my account isn't banned, though.

I moved country, and had to wait to visit the country I registered in to get the account back.

It probably depends on your IP address, country and maybe something else. Some time ago I was unable to register on youtube without providing a phone number, and earlier I have registered a Google Account from Android emulator that was instantly blocked. Maybe it is because of spam, or maybe because lot of people are using the same IP address.

I never put in my number into my Google account. Ironically, the only US number I have is via Google voice/hangouts. So they have it. It's just not associated. I'm not even sure if it would be allowed, as there'd be no way to use it as a 2-factor auth without actually being logged in.

I recently tried doing exactly that, and got back something like "This is not an acceptable verification number" with no further explanation.

I created one on Monday, without a phone number. I did provide a (@outlook.com) recovery email. I did not try to create a Google Voice number for it though and I think that does require a phone number.

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