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Comment by rainingcatndogs | Hacker News Reader

Last week google did something like that to me. It said "device not recognized" and "suspected activity detected" and won't let me in even after I reset my password. That was my reality check. Fortuanately, I was able to login via my old smartphone. I did a google takeout and downloaded all my data. Then I got a domain name and protonmail account and changed email on all of my accounts to my own domain. Now I have some peace of mind that nothing would be lost even if my gmail account is to be gone tomorrow.

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My advice is to enable 2FA on your account and then Google pretty much leaves you alone. Last I checked you did have to provide a phone number when initially turning on 2FA, but once you have any other 2FA method defined (totp, u2f, recovery codes, etc) you can then remove the phone number.

Without 2FA it can be a real pain to recover a Google account if you get locked out.

I did have my phone number linked to gmail and I was able to reset my password using otp code, not 2FA though. As you say, it might not happen if I enable 2FA but I've had enough that day frantically trying to get my ~10 year old account tied to many things back. But still, I would like to keep my account and will follow your advice but won't be counting on it to last forever anymore.

Few months ago I've had an issue with someone trying to fraud money via partner program, testing and using a lot of credit cards, changing IP each time he tested one card. In the end he managed pass trough fraud checks around 50 times. All IP's were from northvpn/expressvpn. So no wonder that you might get ban elsewhere by using same IP as someone else trying to do someting illegal.

What happens if your protonmail account is gone tomorrow?

Still owns domain/email.

What happens if the domain is gone tomorrow?

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21700139 for example.

Definitely easier to get back a gone domain(unless I missed payment) than a gone gmail/other free account.

> What happens if your protonmail account is gone tomorrow?

> > I did a google takeout and downloaded all my data.

> > Then I got a domain name and protonmail account and changed email on all of my accounts to my own domain.

Sounds like they'll be fine? Maybe missing a day or two of email as they switch to a new provider.

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