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Comment by captainmuon | Hacker News Reader

I would understand it if they kicked the customers out of their webstores for physical products. Or if they forbade reselling via license, and had a contractual penalty (where permissible by law). But closing your email accounts? Google (the company that sells phones) and Google (the company that hosts all your digital life) are only incedentally the same entity. It's like your power company also sells toasters, and you resell a toaster on ebay, which they dont like, and then they cut your electricity in retalliation.

It's like if Alphabet bought a company running tollways, and they banned you from using their streets.

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Also even if you have more than enough sufficient information to get a lost Gmail back. Send them your state issued drivers license and ID and birth certificate. It is still not enough to get my account back.

What do I honestly do in a situation like that? (After 2 years of failed recovery attempts, hunting down google employees on social media and their work or personal emails)

I got one single Google employee to respond to a help thread I posted on the Gmail help forums. He responded with a question that was already answered in the original post. And it took me 6 months to get there.

Sue them under wiretapping laws to release the information and redirect the emails to a domain you control. It is a federal crime to interfere with communications.

I'm considering suing Apple under the same laws for blocking messages sent from iPhones to my phone number (you can never truly deregister from iMessage. Apple still silently destroys group messages sent to you).

We need to get more serious about the idea that you can't legally withhold correspondence meant for someone else. These tech companies think they're immune from telecom laws but I am not sure the courts would agree.

There was a class action about the bullshit Apple pulls with iMessage but I don't remember how it resolved.

https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage

I know the steps, the class-action was because even after doing all that iMessage would still not properly deregister numbers, and then a memo was leaked revealing that Apple purposefully didn't solve the problem because it lead to people returning to iPhones after trying Android devices

I'd actually love to see the source on that, if you have it

http://www.macrumors.com/2014/11/11/apple-lawsuit-imessage-i...

here's the lawsuit, I can't find a definitive source on any memo so maybe that was just unfounded rumors

You can't have a mixed group chat between iMessage and SMS. If one person leaves the iMessage ecosystem there's no way to update the group chat to include you.

This is like saying "I was in an IRC channel with friends but I left for Slack and now I don't get their messages"

Stop whinging.

As for group messages, are you sure that it is not that the iPhones are sending them to your Apple ID?

There's no way to distinguish gush between the two in the UI. And I certainly don't receive the messages in the Messages app on my Mac.

That's interesting, I didn't realise there deregister function was incomplete.

If people don't see this, might as well do an Ask HN with more context and contact information. Likely that many Googlers read this.

I tried everything x100 on steroids over the last 2 years. I was strictly ignored and the only thing left for me to do is to go walk in to the Gmail teams office and sit down on a computer and fix it myself.

Try to get in touch with this guy

https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/5dif8j/psa_google_...

It is pathetic that someone has to get referred to a reddit user account for help with a Google-related problem. I am guessing Google just isn't that good at this "internet" thing. Maybe someone can help them setup an actual customer support portal, with real employees.

It's more Google really isn't good at this "people" thing. They see people as an issue and try to genericize everything into an algorithm then wonder why it doesn't get popular or run well.

Maybe they're good at recognizing this "people" problem is not worth their time.

laughs I'd never really thought about it that way, but it does seem to be a good analogy.

Google as the brilliant software developer whose only flaw is that they're completely unwilling to ever write a single-use function.

My understand is that customer service is a scalability problem and isn't financially feasible for free services. If they had a support number they would be deluged with the very angry people you see in the product forums. Many of these are people they simply cannot help as a CS rep because they are angry about things like missing or dropped features. And as it turns out, free users are often the most demanding in terms of attention, time and resources.

What they really need is a customer service team that finds these people that are having genuine issues that can be resolved. They'd need the means to reach out and communicate without that person being able to subsequently share contact information with the world.

That said, I don't know what I'd do as a Google employee looking at this guy's situation. If david.smith@gmail.com is dormant and my name and ID say David Smith why should that give me access to that mailbox? How do you verify the contents without violating someone's privacy? We're not asking some tiny ISP to take a quick peek, this is Google and they have a responsibility to all of their users to practice great care. So we can't assume they're telling the truth and neither can Google. This guy's situation sucks but the mistake of turning over the account to the wrong person is catastrophically worse than the bad experience of denying the rightful owner access. This exact situation is why they have recovery options.

I think it's likely they're telling the truth and I do feel bad for them and their situation. I've been there myself with a yahoo account years ago but at the end of the day the only way I could recover it was using something I no longer had. The things in that mailbox that I wanted access to were also things I would be furious at Yahoo for sharing with someone else no matter what their identification or birth certificate said.

There a lot of cases where people would gladly pay for service to get an issue resolved. I'd use that as a hedge against the people who just want to complain for free.

Allow people to purchase a "certificate of service" at a nominal cost when the account is set up, and then charge them a fee when they need service for the product, verifying the request against the original certificate. That should cover the tech support problem.

Agreed. I'm sorry, but the "these are free services, you shouldn't have any expectation of support" excuse seems to be trotted out far too often by Google to whitewash the utter lack of a support org in critical parts of their empire.

The issue, regardless of the financial model of the services, is that (a) these are now critical services for some people & (b) there is utterly no support path in the event something goes wrong.

Charge $100 or $200 or $2500 per suppprt case, refunding part of the difference if it turns out to be a Google system problem, and people would still be much happier.

The issue is that there's currently no amount of money you can throw at Google to fix things, and no one besides Google has access to implement a fix. And every system has glitches and corner cases when you're running at the scale Google is.

Would paying for Google for Business account help:

https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html

Lowest tier is $5/month. I know my old company used Google for email. Is there a guaranteed access to support. I saw access to "Forums". Anyone have experience with that.

But then Fastmail is $3/month and you get personal support it seems.

How about just a paid phone number. Charge 10c/min.

The issue here is that even with a paid phone number, what could the support rep do?

Sure, they could provide advice, but would you want some stranger who happens to work on Google Support India the ability to look into your account? To reset your password?

It's best they provide buttons for you to fix your own problems than choose privileged people who can invade your privacy to fix problems for you.

You're certainly not the only one. Even as a paying customer it's impossible to get in touch with anyone if you get locked out.

Not even if you get locked out. I tried asking them why my paid gsuite account couldn't be used like a normal google account and all they could do was copy+paste some response about how great paying for google was and that I wasn't paying for anything else.

Alphabet REALLY needs to work on their customer service, especially for paying customers.

I don't trust having email on a domain I don't control (you can't move a gmail account to another provider like you can a phone number). Yet if you want to take advantage of all the features of google home/music/youtube you have to use a normal gmail account.

Google promises not to use any GSuite data for advertising, which limits the services that are available.

Business Gsuite data is also more tightly controlled, which means some integrations necessary to make things work properly aren't possible.

For example, calendar data of Gsuite customers is sensitive enough the assistant AI can't access it, so if you ask the Google assistant "what's my next appointment", it can't answer.

Are you sure there isn't a setting in the Admin Panel to allow this?

I wish...

Can't you just use another email provider as your main account and keep the Google one for YouTube etc.

Yeah, and I've been toying with the idea. What sucks is I'd love to use Google home for flight info but because I use gsuite it wont read emails or calendar. Guess I could have all my email forwarded to a dummy google account just for that.

I thought you could turn the consumer-only apps on in the admin interface.

You can but it limits what you can do. Example, I can use my Google home with my apps account except I can't use calendar, flight info, or be a part of my existing google music/youtube red family group.

I doubt you.

I have found google chaps do come out of the wood work when you post irrefutable evidence of a 'problem', although whether that is even possible is another thing. Try IRC, although it didnt work for me at all, I do believe they said that if the right guy at the right time is on it, he might be able to help.

I have a similar situation. I had created an account just for a specific client to share files via google drive. Don't remember the password any more and can't access those files. No recourse.

What recourse do you expect? Did you set up a recovery address? A recovery phone number? Did you download and keep the recovery codes?

> What do I honestly do in a situation like that?

Learn a valuable lesson and move on. I lost some important data to a free service many years ago and now I don't rely on anything that I can't pay for with a credit card. I figure if something goes horribly wrong maybe the credit card company could work the fraud angle for me. Probably not but it makes me feel a little better.

Time to start transitioning to your own domain name email address!

(It's going to be a big pain...)

https://mailinabox.email/ is pretty good.

Yeah it's good option for those wanting to get into self hosting. Another option is https://mailcow.email which is a more recent entrant to the email self hosting space.

i very much suspect this story is to try and shut the stable door on exactly that bolted horse.

with gmvault now floating at the top of the page i can imagine the gmail adminstrators on the phone to the account managers every few minutes relaying just how many hundreds of terabytes a second in backup bandwidth closing the accounts is now costing them.

Bandwidth costs are trivial to google. I doubt that any of this will put two and two together considering how big cos work.

100 million users downloading 15Gigs of email each is not "trivial", even if its $0.00000001 per MB

And gmail has 1 Billion monthly active users, so that is quite likely a conservative guestimate.

I don't think its implausible that shutting down these guys accounts will cost google a 7 or 8 figure sum in (non budgeted) backbone bandwidth charges alone.

This isn't going to make anywhere near 100million people "quit google" nor do many people have 15GB of mail, or anywhere close.

And you don't pay per megabyte at the peered networks scale, or even 95% percentile.

I didn't say anything about "quitting".

Just a significant number deciding it is time to back up their content.

And at the backbone level it is all charged by the Mbps for example http://www.level3.com/en/legal/ip-traffic-exchange-policy/ http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2014/02/transit-works-costs-i... So a jump in a significant portion of the user base from a few MB per user per day to several GB will be several thousand times more expensive for that day.

That information, while factually correct, isn't applicable to Google in the same way it is to say [insert most other websites].

Google is not a tier 1 provider, there are only 6 of them.

Putting traffic into a tier 1 network costs, taking it pays.

A massive surge from Googles hardware onto the tier 1 networks will be very, very expensive.

Last time it came up was as the BitTorrent protocol started blowing up ISPs that couldn't pay the bills.

Google peers with many national and regional ISPs at exchange points. I don't know the exact numbers, but I'm guessing a fairly significant portion of their traffic does not go over traditional "tier 1" networks and rather is handed off directly to ISPs.

Not a big one if you e.g. have someone else provide the backing email service.

I bought my own domain back in 2002 or so, and note it's important that you own it*, and then set up email with a quality shared hosting service company. At some point I noticed this well recommended Fastmail company, which was lots cheaper than the shared hosting, the other features of which I no longer needed. Which has now been providing my email service for years, and I note they also do contacts and calendaring. And have really good customer service. And are reliable, including not having GMail's sometimes too aggressive spam filtering. Etc.

Although if I remember correctly they were pants at accepting notifications from Fanfiction.net, which is not something I really worked at fixing since it prompts me to regularly check my backup Hotmail (Live, whatever) account. Which emphasizes one thing, if you do this, make very sure to maintain another email account in case you have any problems with your personal domain.

You also ought to get treated more seriously by various important others if you have your own domain instead of a generic GMail or other big free email provider account.

I can also vouch for Fastmail.

On top of everything mentioned by hga, as the name implies, the web UI is fast, and their calendar is good.

Another nice thing with owning the domain is that you can set up a catch-all, then use unique addresses to sign up for stuff. I sign up with <service>@mydomain.com now, so when <service> sells my address, I know who to blame.

I still receive stuff on my old gmail, so I do POP retrieval from Fastmail.

For me the big pain is moving off all the stuff referencing a *@gmail.com address to something else. There is no real such thing as 'phone number portability' in email. Even if you forward everything, you can still lose the forwarding.

The 'phone number portability' of email is you owning the domain, and pointing the mx record to whatever mail provider you like. To switch providers you simply register an account somewhere else and change your dns record.

By starting with an "@gmail.com" address you willingly give that up, but that's not the system's fault.

I did this a few years ago. I don't know if I'm 100% transitioned but I'm just about.

I setup the forward from <name>@gmail.com to <name>@<mydomain>. I then flagged things that are coming from gmail and slowly updated addresses on those websites to point at <name>@<mydomain>. You don't have to be in a hurry to get it done you just have to be working towards the end goal.

Yeah it's just a matter of making a start and doing a bit each day/week. It's surprising how much you will achieve over time.

And that's why you do it sooner rather than later -- as time passes, it gets harder.

I set up my new domain email address as an email forwarder to Gmail, and used it like that for nearly a year. When signing up for things, I'd just use that address instead of the Gmail address.

When I moved to FastMail, I set up that email address to go to FastMail instead. Most of my inbound mail instantly came with it. It's been a couple weeks, I still get stuff on my Gmail. So I check it once or twice a day still at the moment, and when I get something from some website, I go log into that account, and change my email address.

Fastmail can also pull in from your gmail account. You could do that and tag the emails. It might be a good time saver and save you from having to do manual checks.

Yeah, I know. But my concern is if it's 'too easy' to just handle my Gmail messages in Fastmail that I'll procrastinate changing over the accounts properly.

Once I get down to a minimal amount I'll forward and tag.

I did it, and it's less pain than you think as long as you have a year or two to do it. Try fastmail and just start replying to all emails from your personal domain.

I use a dot io domain name for one of my email addresses, but I've always been slightly worried about the possibility of my domain registrar being socially engineered. If someone gets into my domain account, that could lead to ATO and change of the MX records. Should I be concerned? Is there a "best practices" dot io domain registrar that won't allow this to happen?

There is something called "locking facility" that some registrars provide. That is changes can be made only with a 2 factor auth.

Might also be worth using a very long (1 week - 1 month?) TTL for your DNS MX records. This is no guarantee but it should buy you some extra time over the default which could be only an hour or so.

One trick is to set a very long TTL on your MX records to mitigate any damage if your account is compromised.

Similar problem, a family member lost their gmail account and none of the standard ways work to get it back.

As proof I would welcome Google employees to study the past mail of other family member mail headers including mine to give them absolute proof of whose account it is.

There is no way to ask them to do this.

Wow, that's crazy. How'd that happen?

It's not crazy at all.

Lost access to my old Gmail account recoveries cause it had been over 4 years since the last login. My M$ account recovery is not possible despite opening about 10+ cases with their engineers who fail to respond 100% of the time. And when they did it was automated. So without either recovery available ill just go to type in all the info I have about my old Gmail. Automated response forms with more automated rejections. I've tried it easily 300+ times at this point. Doesn't work.

You should have noted that 4 years of inactivity is enough to close any free provider!

If it was so important data isnt the onus on you to keep it locally backedup or at least login once a few months?

> over 4 years since the last login

Ohh come on now. Are they supposed to keep things around indefinitely? Most providers will wipe accounts after just a few months of inactivity.

To be sure, there's no technical reason why that should be necessary.

Agreed. As a comparison mobile phone credits in the UK seem to last at most 6 months, then the company close the account, resell the number, and eat your credit. And that's for paid service.

Yea they are actually.

I don't care about other providers I want my old gmail back.

It mentions that most people made up brand-new accounts to run the deal from. If Google's initial investigation showed only brand-new accounts, it might explain their move to delete the accounts entirely. They reversed the decision when they realized real accounts were getting caught up as well.

Yeah, let's be honest, if you're running a scheme like this, you probably have a hunch that it may not be the most legal thing ever... why the hell would you use your real account with all your information instead of making a new dummy account?

They probably assumed it was a bunch of fake account and deleted them all in one big swoop, but once they realized a few of them were real, they restored them...

Just the media blowing things out of proportion, and for some reason everyone's defending these people who were doing something clearly very shady and wrong.

I do agree though that the thought of losing access to all your data is scary, and people should definitely do takeout and be more conscious about it, but in this case specifically, it was hardly Google's fault.

Google is at the end of the day a service, and if you go on their lawn and start shitting all over it, what do you expect will happen?

> Google is at the end of the day a service, and if you go on their lawn and start shitting all over it, what do you expect will happen?

Or, rather, Google is a utility. At least Gmail is by now.

That has very interesting implications.

They reversed because they got a ton of bad press for it. They've been banning accounts with no recourse for years now, and will continue to do so until people speak out loudly enough against it. Maybe then at least they could allow those banned to export their data.

I agree with your statements.

...However, to me it feels like its not so much that google killed off access to email as if it was a separate product...Rather, the physical device that google sells (and its associated platform a la Play store) are dependent on an identity mechanism...And the identity mechanism was what google was trying to shut down...It so happens of course that the identity mechanism that google chose to use (and has chosen to use for their android-based phones) is one's gmail address. THIS begs the question, if there was no such dependency (like one's gmail address), could google have exerted such power in shutting down these people's access? I'll admit I've traditionally been a fan of android phones...but this just struck me as way too much power, and scary.

Yeah, i might still need a semi-"throw away" google/gmail account to use my phone, etc. But as far as one of my "identity mechanisms", I'm starting to look at alternatives such as fastmail.com (which I just started a trial account with) for my main email. If anyone can suggest other alternatives - for quality (non-free) mail providers beyond just fastmail - I'm all ears.

The "identity mechanism" is actually your "Google account", gmail and the other google accounts used to be separate. But some one had the bright idea to force G+ on everyone by forcing them to merge all accounts, thus drawing audience from gmail and youtube. A really swell move.

If google wanted to they could provide oauth like identity only service.

Google isn't just Gmail and Youtube anymore though. Maybe it was 5-10 years ago, but now there are dozens of products. Music, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Android.

All of those require an account. You're basically implying that they should have a separate account for every one of their services, which makes absolutely no sense...

Then, back when there are just two things, merging them into one was maybe not so good of a decision, but at this point, having a single account makes much more sense from a user experience point of view.

Perhaps it makes sense for Google to have one account system for all their services, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea for people trying to use those services to have them all linked together. It's kinda creepy, honestly, and it really makes me reluctant to use any of Google's services.

I could theoretically register a separate account for any one of those. The thing is. I should be given the option of not connecting all of those. Separation of concerns.

Yep, agreed; i could not have said this better myself! +1

>It's like your power company also sells toasters, and you resell a toaster on ebay, which they dont like, and then they cut your electricity in retalliation.

Isn't that how The Phone Company used to work?

And in a lot of places. Until governments broke them down.

Looks to me that Google has too many monopolies under the same administration.

And just like the phone company, Google doesn't have to care.

> It's like if Alphabet bought a company running tollways, and they banned you from using their streets.

If it's their road, what's the problem? It's not like the government is banning you from the roads.

(Joking, in case it isn't obvious.)

This is why their should be regulation. Email should be on par with telephone service.

Could be worse. Google are really tight with the Obama White House. If they're serious enough about maintaining relations with a Trump Whiter House, you might get a digital death sentence for calling a certain man a 'tiny-fingered, cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing sh#tgibbon' :)

Of course, that name-calling person was a Scot, but Google is everywhere and everything…

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