Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Help – Locked out of 10 years Gmail account

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 261 posts

Re: Ask HN: Help – Locked out of 10 years Gmail account

#181

Post by tag2103 »

joe__f wrote: post #126
blacklight wrote: post #96

This is probably the #500 post on HN that reads "help I've been locked out of my Google account for Kafkaesque/inexplicable reasons and I have nobody to reach out to". If you're still using Google products as your primary drivers, then it's entirely your fault. Do yourself a favour in 2023: drop Google and all the filthy excrement that they produce. There's plenty of much better alternatives, and from a purely market…

I've been thinking to move away from Gmail for a while now, what alternatives do you suggest?

Anything- including RFC 2549 based communications. =)

Re: Ask HN: Help – Locked out of 10 years Gmail account

#182

Post by Herbstluft »

Doubtme wrote: post #125
Herbstluft wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Losing access to your mail account causes significant and critical damage without ever considering the existence of backups. Backups don't help with the painful (and sometimes barely possible) migration of your accounts to a new address, updating contacts, loss of mails that arrived after you were locked out, et cetera

Welp that's the product you signed up for. Much like PayPal stealing from millions of Americans for a full decade+ Can't backup money either. That doesn't stop these policies of zero human support and only infinity robot responses from remaining until today. Writing a law and getting it passed to curtail this behavior absolute nonsense. Complaining about the next 1000000 people to lose access without doing 1 single t…

Oh I agree. Gmail is basically a daily lottery for account lockout.

Still important to raise awareness, these posts certainly help and make it harder for google apologists to deny it (a few years ago there was a lot more victim blaming in the comments of these threads).

I felt the need to point it out because backups were brought several times here as a defense against OPs scenario which they aren't.

Re: Ask HN: Help – Locked out of 10 years Gmail account

#183

Post by el_nahual »

Whenever I think about migrating my "primary" email to be at a domain I own, I come up with the following risk calculus:

What's more likely:

A) That i get locked out of Gmail for some byzantine reason I can't get out of B) That for whatever reason (new card, I'm in the hospital, whatever) I forget/am unable to renew my domain and it gets sniped.

Re: Ask HN: Help – Locked out of 10 years Gmail account

#184

Post by sergiomattei »

blacklight wrote: post #96

This is probably the #500 post on HN that reads "help I've been locked out of my Google account for Kafkaesque/inexplicable reasons and I have nobody to reach out to". If you're still using Google products as your primary drivers, then it's entirely your fault. Do yourself a favour in 2023: drop Google and all the filthy excrement that they produce. There's plenty of much better alternatives, and from a purely market…

What do you suggest? Asking honestly as a long time google user.

Re: Ask HN: Help – Locked out of 10 years Gmail account

#187

Post by GoOnThenDoTell »

timrichard wrote: post #91
lrei wrote: post #5

Yikes! good luck, hope it works out. This is scary. Gmail is still, by far, the best email app. Something like this could happen to me and, I suspect, a lot of other people.

I know it seems lo-tech, but it's a good idea to print out the ten Gmail recovery codes and keep them in a safe place. I've done the same for GitHub too.

We’ve gone full circle to the the idea of post-it note credentials

Re: Ask HN: Help – Locked out of 10 years Gmail account

#188

Post by Beltalowda »

harshalizee wrote: post #123
blacklight wrote: post #96

This is probably the #500 post on HN that reads "help I've been locked out of my Google account for Kafkaesque/inexplicable reasons and I have nobody to reach out to". If you're still using Google products as your primary drivers, then it's entirely your fault. Do yourself a favour in 2023: drop Google and all the filthy excrement that they produce. There's plenty of much better alternatives, and from a purely market…

But realistically how do you do it? I've stopped signing up for any new Google products for well over half a decade now. Even moved my email to protonmail. I have a little over 500 accounts tied to my Gmail over the last two decades. Moving them is a pain but still possible. The problem arises when it comes to existing accounts with byzantine financial institutions. Trying to change email addresses that are linked to…

> Quite a few institutions won't let you use an email that comes from protonmail or a custom domain. So, many times I'm forced back into using a Gmail address to prevent a whole host off other issues

As in, they check "if domain != 'gmail.com' { fuckyou(); }"? Or as in "they MTAs are not very good and just don't deliver email"?

Re: Ask HN: Help – Locked out of 10 years Gmail account

#189

Post by sneak »

hanklazard wrote: post #73
krono wrote: post #31

Whilst it might not be of help to OP, I suggest everyone else to do a data export for all your important services every once in a while and save it with your other backups. https://takeout.google.com https://account.microsoft.com/privacy/download-data

For sure. I believe I have this set to create an export and notify me the backup every quarter or so. Not the perfect solution, but until I do the right thing and switch over to fastmail, this at least ensures I can only lose a few months ( gulp ) worth of email.

You can move your old emails off of your current email provider at any time even without changing any email settings or where new mails go.

It always seemed silly to me to have the server where your new mails get delivered be the same server as where your email archive lives.

Re: Ask HN: Help – Locked out of 10 years Gmail account

#190

Post by sneak »

evouga wrote: post #82

Can someone explain how it’s anything but completely insane for an online service to deny access to someone with a *correct* password?? This isn’t someone getting locked out because they forgot their password (where I can at least understand why the user is at fault).

I have the correct passwords for gazillions of gmail accounts (that are not mine) because people reuse passwords constantly.
Post reply on HN