[dead]
Ask HN: How do I get my Google account back?
151–154 of 154 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do I get my Google account back?
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a mistake I will never make again. Your phone number is insecure - but even if wasn't, you are setting yourself up for losing your account forever if you ever forget to transfer all your 2FA numbers, or if the phone company decides they want to cancel your contract, or potentially if you lose your SIM card, or even if whatever SMS gateway doesn't like your number for whatever reason. Literally, you are giving…
> you are setting yourself up for losing your account forever if you ever forget to transfer all your 2FA numbers, or if the phone company decides they want to cancel your contract, or potentially if you lose your SIM card, or even if whatever SMS gateway doesn't like your number for whatever reason Its the same with your address, what if your landlord randomly decides to kick you or your house burns down? Where I li…
> Its the same with your address, what if your landlord randomly decides to kick you or your house burns down?
Not the same at all, you can just go to the post office and file a forwarding address and all is well.
Phone numbers are very ephemeral. I have many phone numbers associted with many older accounts, like one from an office phone from a company that doesn't even exist anymore. Learning from those lessons, I go out of my way to never associate a phone number with anything anymore, it's just asking for future pain.
Re: Ask HN: How do I get my Google account back?
#153I can't help the OP, but I can help you, gmail user reading this: This WILL happen to you. Get your own domain and set up email through it ASAP. Use some free one, use a paid one (I like fastmail), but get it done now. Then migrate all your accounts to it.
I really really want to do this but am stuck on Gmail because of their spam filtering. Is there ANY other provider that does spam filtering that actually works? I tried Fastmail, but I receive so much spam (>600 per day vs. ~20 non-spam per day) that only Gmail's spam filtering is good enough. I've tried others (like Fastmail) and typically ~50/day get through their spam filters, vs. at Gmail where on a typical day 1…
> (Why do I get so much spam? Because I've been using the same email address, never hiding it at all even on Usenet, for 25 years.)
I've had my same email for about as long as you (maybe 1-2 years more), never hiding it at all including Usenet.
> I really really want to do this but am stuck on Gmail because of their spam filtering.
gmail spam filtering isn't very good. Lots of false positives which is far worse than the occasional false negative. I have a gmail-hosted account for work and it's very annoying.
I host my own email infrastructure and spam isn't a problem. With a bayesian filter trained on my content, I rarely see any spam. Maybe like 1-2 per month? I don't keep track, it's very rare. And no false positives ever.
Re: Ask HN: How do I get my Google account back?
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
As much as I appreciate people like you doing new things, the same will happen to your project if it grows. There will be a point that your service will simply have too many users to handle all of their requests in a satisfactory way. If you disagree I'm interested why you think y'all can make it differently.
Why? If it is economically viable at small scale why wouldn't it be more so at a larger scale? Google thinks their algorithms for suspicious activity is more important than their users data. Just removing access altogether.
> If it is economically viable at small scale why wouldn't it be more so at a larger scale?
Well, because of scaling. Let's say 1% of your users create a support request every month (no idea if this is way too high or too low). Trying to KISS.
If your service has 1000 users, that makes 10 support requests per month. One person can handle them alone, probably.
Google Drive alone has 1b users, but let's cut that by 50%, after all this is the number which Google reports themselves. Still, with half a biillion users you would suddenly receive 50 million requests. Let's be even more generous and say that these requests are opened over the span over a year, not month. That's still 4.5 million support requests per month.
Don't even know if my calculations serve any purpose, what I am trying to say is that the amount of users and support staff your service needs do not scale 1:1. At a certain point(no idea what the cut-off is) your service will create so many requests that it will become impossible to handle them all with care and humans. To add to this, the more users your service has, the bigger your infrastructure has to be, meaning that you need more people maintaining this infrastructure.
Maybe I am to pessimistic or whatever, could be. Just my 2cts.