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Comment by kart23 | Hacker News Reader

there needs to be some kind of law or regulation around this right? email has become as, if not more important as regular mail, and the government should be protecting access to it.

try sending it to your senator and local representative. I think the FTC would also be interested in this. if google won’t even give you support for the issue, that should really be addressed by the government imo.

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In my country the state maintains an alternative to email, where you can receive messages from anything government related, plus any business that registers. It's opt-in only, you cannot receive spam or be subscribed to entities against your will, and of course if you lose access you can just go down to the nearest citizen's office and get it sorted. You can also pay bills through it.

It is a nice solution but unfortunately everyone already has to have email accounts, so it becomes just yet another account to check, which is not attractive.

There is not need for a law. Just don't use google.

If someone wants to stop using gmail, it's horribly inconvenient to move to another service. You need to update your email with all your other accounts, which for most people is pretty much unfeasible. You can't take your @gmail.com address, which means switching email providers is extremely difficult. There should really be some consumer protection laws around email.

Email forwarding makes migrating away from Gmail substantially easier:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10957

With this, you don't have to update your email on all of your accounts at once. You can do it at your own pace.

Consumer protection laws requiring data portability would still be welcome.

That is nice, didn't realize you could do that. But yeah, people in the same spot as OP can't exactly do that if they're locked out for no apparent reason.

if the U.S. government offered an email an email service, I'd use it.

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