Google ate my email address | Hacker News Reader

Google ate my email address

rondam.blogspot.com

121 pointslisper33 comments

Welcome to Google Hell. I have described my experience here http://blog.foundrs.com/2010/11/15/the-10-step-google-login-... (the 10-step login from hell).

I never wanted to have a gmail account. But to use a certain service, years ago, Google required that I create a gmail account. So I did. Then someone invited me to a Google Apps project, so I got another email there. Then YouTube decided to merge my login info with Google. It's been more than 5 years, and now I have 6 accounts with Google, and it's been hell ever since. It did get better this year as Google started better supporting merging and multiple accounts.

Don't blame the user. I never wanted this to happen to me.

I experienced something similar, and eventually gave up because I got stuck in an endless loop -- and as a consequence I had to give up using that google service. Since there was no way to contact Google about this matter I blamed myself: I thought I was the only one on Earth stupid enough to get in this situation and that the other 6.9 billion people get along with Google fine. But since then I've read more stories like these, and I'm glad I'm not the only one anymore.

Note: Google does NOT support merging accounts.

I've had a similar experiences.

The Youtube merge was a disaster causing many Gmail addresses to be merged with "nicknamed" Youtube channels that users didn't want anymore. Since Google refuses to step in and delete accounts or unlink them, many people are stuck with a Youtube account nickname they don't want to be associated with. This got even worse over the last few weeks as Google now automatically logs you into Youtube.

The Google Apps/Full Google Account so called "merge" never actually merged anything, it just created 2 full Google Account, a new one under your domain email, and the old one still active under a modified version of the your email address.

Google has no reason why they can't unlink, merge, or rename accounts/usernames. I'm convinced that almost every single person in the world has 2 or more Google accounts.

Google Hell is right.

YouTube hell gets even better if you signed up for Google Apps in a country where YouTube isn't officially "launched" (what does that even mean?), like Austria.

My google apps account currently has a YouTube account associated with it that causes an error message to replace the current page if I do anything on that site while logged in as that apps account. Like a video, get redirected to a white page saying something went wrong. My solution now is to only log into google apps via Fluid/Mailplane or anonymous Chrome windows.

Whoever engineered this mess should go take a swim in a volcano.

YouTube insisted I login in order to watch some movie trailer, so I did so with my gmail account. It then insisted that I give a nickname. I didn't care at the time, as I figured I could just change the name later - surely the only unique ID here is my gmail account. And that's why my YouTube name is skadfjlsakdfjlksdfjl.

Ha!

I'm upvoting you because I did almost exactly the same thing in that situation... my YouTube name is lalalalalalalala2334.

and mine "thisloginprocesssux"

As jack of all trades I admin the Google Apps account for our company. Recently (believe September or October was the cutoff) Google Apps accounts became full Google Accounts. Before that, you could have different accounts with the same email and possibly password, but being very different accounts. In the process, they merged your Google App Account and the Google Account for your Google App email into one. It worked quite well, but was very confusing and sometimes spit out errors. I've got all four of us moved over, and having Google App account being a Google Account is much more logical.

> Am I Human? Clearly, YouTube is not.

That about sums it up. ;-)

I have a Google Apps account + an older GMail that I use for receiving spam.

And when Google Plus launched, because it wasn't available for Google Apps users, I refused to subscribe using my regular Gmail account, as I could see another instance of Google Hell from miles away. What's interesting is that whenever I bitched about Google Plus not being available for Google Apps, people would tell me that Google Apps support ain't needed and that I should just use a Gmail account.

So really, I also blame users. If not enough users are bitching, Google doesn't have the incentive to change this accounts hell.

I wish Google had some form of reasonable technical support. That way, HN homepage wouldn't be the only way to get their attention.

Agree. Its surprising how much Google can get by without providing any customer support at all. I stopped using my gmail accounts earlier this year when I lost my I emails and google couldn't track them down.

Apparently they offer 24/7 phone and email support for Google Apps for Business customers, but I've never had any experience with it. Could someone else comment as to whether or not their Apps customer support is just as bad?

Might be worth throwing out a Ask HN in prime time, I'd really like to know the answer to this too having experienced my own mini-google hell today and realizing I had no source of support apart from sub-standard forums that only 1/4 of questions seem to get answered in.

Very bad, at least in our case (small company). They reply mostly with templates. When one issue would have taken a bit more time to solve (Thunderbird IMAP issue with ONE of our user names) they simply stopped responding after a while.

AND: You can NOT go back to the free service, at least not easily! Talk about lock-in...

Really? I had no problem downgrading my account. It was during the demo period though.

My only experience with Apps phone support was when I signed up for the 30 day business trial to use the IMAP import feature. Half way through a massive import, I got an email from Apps saying that I was going to be charged the $50 yearly fee about 25 days early and then another that my account had been downgraded (I did not downgrade it). Called phone support, got a real person in what sounded like England very quickly. They were helpful and reported the issue to the engineers. They reversed the charge no questions asked, I re-signed up for the demo, and all was well.

So tl;dr the phone support seems ok.

One of the interesting things I discovered was that their idea of 24/7 support simply meant was that I could leave a message anytime, and they'd get back to me at some unspecified point (but usually within 48 hours!) between 8 and 5, Mon. through Fri.

When I did get a calls back, their first questions never pertained to my problem. They were far more concerned with the state of their self-help system, and wanted to know if and how failures there led to my calling them directly.

This was a couple of years ago, and it may have gotten better since then. However, the steady drumbeat of posts like this indicates that it hasn't.

In this case, they wouldn't even need to provide support if they just offered a way to merge accounts. I have three, and it's a pain.

Similar situation happened to me:

1) Signed up to have google manage the email for my domain.

2) Tried to create michelle@domain.com

3) Google failed. Signup process hung.

4) Tried again. App hung.

5) Tried different name. Worked.

6) Tried to add michelle in the admin panel and got: "Username already exists" but there's no way to see, edit, or login as michell.

It happens quite often, and remains unresolved for the majority people: http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/search.py?hl=en&foru...

It's been months of trying different things, forum posts and contact attempts and it's still broken.

Google is a great company with many great products, but they will straight up not care about your customer service needs and will just let your business suffer.

After some hours, I managed to get one domain into Google Apps, but managing 2 domains at a time is a real b*tch. Basically, the only thing you can do with domain number 2 is create users for it. Just about no configuration.

It would be nice if Google would publish a finite state machine showing what's going on with your accounts/email addresses, and what you can do to transition to somewhere better.

It might make people feel better to know that there is a logical process (is there?) when something screws up, rather than having to pray to the user support people to fix your account.

I mean, I don't pay Google for anything, and I know that Google is mainly made up of machines, not humans. So I imagine my accounts could get "eaten" at any time, perhaps permanently.

I don't really trust Google with my Google accounts.

"to know that there is a logical process (is there?)"

There isn't. You're fucked.

-- ex Google employee

Google seems to have done pretty much the same thing with one of my accounts. It started a couple weeks ago when I needed a gmail account to test a mail server bug. When I created the gmail account they changed my 'primary' address to the new gmail address.

Then in the last couple of days, they decided that my secondary email address was now part of a Google apps account because it was associated with a Postini mail filtering account. They removed the secondary email from my account and created a new account for it using the same password.

Now I'm stuck with two different email addresses for logging into various Google services.

I've had a gmail account since the service started, and I have an email address thats just my first name--a very common first name. Because of this, 15 email addresses are associated with mine (as in, I can reset their passwords and what not). Not really the same kind of deal, and it doesn't really affect me--just the people who signed up with my email. Just had to rant about it.

The only time I got this when I had my gmail account forward to my google apps account, when they started unifying the whole account stuff it was no longer a valid backup email account and had to be removed.

I recently picked up a fastmail.fm account and am forwarding gmail to that, in case gmail effs up.

Backing up your e-mail regularly is a good idea, but not really relevant to this discussion, is it?

Be careful, I've created a fastmail.fm (actually airpost.net which is one of their domains) account, and unless you're paying for it, they can and will wipe your account if you leave it fallow/unused for a year or more (unsure what the duration is).

This became an annoying problem when I created a seperate account backed by my airpost.net email (won't do that again unless I decide to pay for the email acct).

I am paying for it. :) It's not very expensive, especially if you pick 2/3 year options. That said, the interface is vastly inferior to gmail's, IMHO. What, no conversation view? I can't believe people still use non-threaded email views.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3216029

Google is pretty notorious for providing no support, and in the post he notes that one of the avenues of support (google groups) is effectively cut off to him because of the issue.

Googling "google groups support" -> clicking "Contacting Us" at the bottom -> Email us -> this contact form: http://www.google.com/support/groups/bin/request.py?contact_...

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