But even then you have to trust FastMail not to lock you out. Sure it's a paid service so less likely and I'm sure their customer service is better. But it doesn't fix the root issue of being dependent on one party.
The root issue is Google. This doesn't happen with most companies. This is specific to Google's culture, which treats customers as statistics. That comes out of how Google thought about search and ads, and doesn't work for anything else.
The secondary issue is being dependent on one party.
I'm generally against too much regulation, but given how important e-mails are (access to all sorts of accounts, important messages from clients, tax, etc.), this is a case where a certain service level needs to be mandatory, e.g., unlocking within few hours.
With the office 365 support I did have a minor accounting issue that they didn’t intend to fix and support tried some standard responses (I needed the billing company name to be different from the Domain/account name, which isn’t possible and the support didn’t know and asked me to do a bunch of things before I figured out through a post that it’s not possible - an edge case that isn’t too much of an issue unlike being locked out)
Last time this happened with google I got lucky and found the password after trying for 3 weeks with support.
What doesn’t work that easily is resetting passwords without account access, especially since more services are switching to magic links instead of passwords (and the issues of managing multiple accounts in a standard browser password manager with things like slack having different sub domains and accounts for different projects)
For me the solution is to use a paid service or a free service at smaller business where employee/user ratio is better.
The single time I needed support from them, I was replied by a person that understood my problem and while they didn't fix it (it was a feature request) it was added to their backlog.
The suggestion appeared live like a year after and was contacted saying it was available in case I still wanted to use it.
From Google, on the other hand, I never got a human reply to any issue. The one that pissed me off the most was that my location history pre-2015 disappeared for some reason and I was using it to geotag old photos. No response, no acknowledging of the issue, nothing.
I found a UI regression a few months back with the way threaded messages were working. Notified FM, they replied within a few hours acknowledging it was a bug and they would fix it asap. Fix was out within a few days, and they followed back to with me to confirm it was fixed for me.
The critique on the earlier post is a little like saying it's still a problem that you need to trust your local supermarket for food. Which is true, but still much better than relying to avoid starvation exclusively on just-in-time shipments from an automated unstaffed ACME Growers Warehouse in Nowhere, USA.