I helped my mother reformat her computer remotely. We successfully ported her mail client but managed to lose her gmail password - meaning we had enough access to send/receive emails but not create new sessions. The account was created some time in 2006. A week prior to the reformat she had changed jobs, and lost the mobile phone number associated with her account.

The second factor email was associated with my account, I could see reset codes come through which were relayed to her but would result in an 'oops, something went wrong'. My guess is a bug due to account age / whatever.

I figured we had enough evidence to obtain a password reset, so I googled for gmail support contact details. There are none.

I then tried repeatedly to contact Google via twitter, all my tweets were ignored - probably because I only have like 20 followers.

In the end, my mother ended up porting her old mobile number to a prepaid sim, as $previouscompany had disconnected the number entirely, and used that as the second factor to reset the account.

Pretty damn frustrating that Google doesn't have any unpaid inbound support _AT ALL_.

Next time I'll consider paying a twitter influencer to impersonate me (or my mother), or paying for adspace, or using a mail service that exposes at least some form of support.