Ask HN: Help – Locked out of 10 years Gmail account • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by blacklight » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 10:53 AM UTC

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?

I've been using Protonmail with 3 custom domains for a few years, but I'm quite upset by the state of their bridge. They struggled a lot with IMAP compatibility, they only test it on Thunderbird, Outlook and Apple Mail before releasing it, and you can't connect to the bridge from another machine (well, you can technically set up an SSH tunnel or use socat to forward the localhost ports, but that's a hack that is not officially supported nor advised).

I'm now considering switching to Fastmail or Tutanota.

Or even run my own mail server. I used to do that until a couple of years ago, but I eventually got frustrated by all the dumb rules that Google and Microsoft (but mostly Microsoft) set in place to discourage people from running their own servers.

However, given the amount of time that I've already spent to debug the Proton bridge and open PRs to fix their sh*t, I must acknowledge that running my own Postfix server and spending a couple of hours to set up the right DNS records would have probably saved me a lot of time (and money).

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

#252

Post by anter » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 2:20 PM UTC

Alex3917 wrote: post #10

The longer it's been since anyone has logged in, the more confidence Google will have that it's really you trying to log in. In all likelihood you'll be able to get back in within a couple weeks.

Not necessarily. I've two accounts that I couldn't access for multiple years now, google simply refuses to let me in despite having all of the correct credentials.

For anyone reading this, do not rely on google services, you'll move cities, change your number, or as OP change your password and _you will get locked out_ with no recourse.

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

#253

Post by Technetium » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 3:19 PM UTC

usr1106 wrote: post #167

jeffbee wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you or can you try to make sure that your behavior is s close to normal as possible? If you normally access your account from Chrome, use Chrome. If you normally use macOS use it. If you normally have a static address at home, use it. Trying to recover your account from your friend’s house in another country, or whatever, could be making it worse.

My IPv4 address at home has not changed for over 10 years. My IPv6 address at work has not changed for 4 years (modulo privacy entension). I have not used any public hotspot for at least 5 years. Still Google greets me several times a month welcome on your new Linux computer. Yes, I use Cookie Auto Delete. But if they had had reasonable algorithms, they would long have learned that I never have their surveillance his…

You can't remove the data that keeps you signed in, then turn around to say their sign-in algorithms should be better.

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

#254

Post by extasia » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 5:43 PM UTC

jacob019 wrote: post #236

ajross wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize that "My Domain Got Stolen and the Registrar Won't Fix It" is another whole subgenre of this kind of anecdata, right? My point is just that there's no free lunch. Everything breaks, but on balance I'd trust Big Tech to get it right more than little companies like Fastmail or your domain registrar.

Whoa there, what reasoning leads you to believe that "Big Tech" is more trustwothy than "little companies"?

> small companies that I'm actually paying

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

#255

Post by spopejoy » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 10:14 PM UTC

moffkalast wrote: post #216

BenjiWiebe wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with Thunderbird? My workplace uses it, my family's small business uses it, I use it. Has lots of features, doesn't require a fast stable Internet connection, and there's no risk of losing your emails because $provider locked you out. Plus if you have multiple email accounts, it's super convenient to get them all in one place.

Idk, Thunderbird, Outlook, and desktop email checkers in general seem absolutely antediluvian to me. Like CRT screens, trackball mice, and space cadet pinball. Do you still have to fetch mail manually like a caveman or did they make it automatic yet? Does your mail sync between all your devices? I still think it's less likely to get banned from gmail than my local hdds to fail.

> I still think it's less likely to get banned from gmail than my local hdds to fail

Uhh the whole discussion is about exactly this problem which you've decided won't happen to you because ... ?

Thunderbird rules and isn't going away, and makes things like blocking remote images easy (as opposed to gmail where you lose basic UX if you turn it off so most people don't).

What's more, gmail's basic features have really suffered in the last 10+ years. I search 20 years of email in Thunderbird faster and more efficiently than the bloatware POS gmail is now.

But best of all, I don't use gmail! I never have to worry about the nightmare scenarios presented here and nobody spies on my email (other than the NSA :) )

Oh -- physical backups rule too. From rotating through various drives my email is backed up at least 16 times over.

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

#256

Post by spopejoy » Tue, Dec 27, 2022, 10:17 PM UTC

powerapple wrote: post #242

I feel sorry for you. Someone at Google PLEASE, PLEASE, make it enough for a registered phone number to reset the password. I got my phone number with my passport, it is the last thing that don't need any verification. Why is it not necessary? AND stop sending verification email to the email address I am recovering. It is a sick joke.

Guess you've never been simjacked

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

#257

Post by powerapple » Wed, Dec 28, 2022, 11:56 AM UTC

spopejoy wrote: post #256

powerapple wrote: post #242

I feel sorry for you. Someone at Google PLEASE, PLEASE, make it enough for a registered phone number to reset the password. I got my phone number with my passport, it is the last thing that don't need any verification. Why is it not necessary? AND stop sending verification email to the email address I am recovering. It is a sick joke.

Guess you've never been simjacked

no, and it is not something I worry about to be honest.

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

#258

Post by shadowgovt » Wed, Dec 28, 2022, 3:08 PM UTC

mindslight wrote: post #124

stanleydrew wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to try to convince anyone that has their mind made up about "dumpster fire" companies or whatever. For anyone else reading, I'll just say that we all know there are tradeoffs between security and usability and we can actually have a good-faith discussion about that if we want to.

The problem is that this trade off is between your usability and Google's security, so the choice of their security wins out every time. I have never bought into this regressive corporate security model in which my desktop computer is supposedly less trusted than assorted web app accounts. Unless I've opted in to something different, knowing the password should grant basically full access to the account. If there are…

It's between your usability and security and the integrity of Google's offering.

The lockouts are there because of how easy it is, without them, to compromise someone's email access. People leave their email password lying "in the open" all the time (for a very broad definition of "in the open" that includes things like "re-use it in another site that gets compromised, and use the same username on that site so a cross-site attack attempt is basically a free action for an attacker to take"). When a Gmail account is compromised, people lose everything digital because they've routed their entire digital security story through their Gmail and it's a trivial operation to harvest all that data once an attacker has access. So the damage to an individual is massive when a Gmail account is breached. And since Gmail doesn't actually know who a person is, correction of a breached account is extremely painful (consider, for every method Google might add to prove your identity to restore ownership of your account, how a malicious actor could use that approach to steal your account).

I've been on the receiving end of a Gmail lockout (cooked a phone on vacation while my OTPs were stored in an envelope at home), and it sucks. But it sucks less than having my whole digital life story (access to HN, access to every forum I'm on, access to every hosting service I work with, access to every bank account I own) compromised because that Gmail account is the receiving target for every "reset your password" flow of every service I operate with online, and I'm the average use case.

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

#259

Post by awinter-py » Wed, Dec 28, 2022, 7:16 PM UTC

cuteboy19 wrote: post #214

awinter-py wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes exactly. if G were following best practices from the consumer banking industry, 2fa would be more like 'old password + random row from your equifax profile'

And of course, the last 4 digits of your ssn

'any digit from your ssn'

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

#260

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jan 01, 2023, 7:53 AM UTC

Jabbles wrote: post #205

schiffern wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for everyone's help. Backup email works now. Looks like (fingers still crossed) I'll be getting back into my main account in 48 hours. Obviously I'm re-working my email solution as we speak... starting with backing up my Google data! Lots of good recommendations in this thread. Learn from my mistakes . It can happen to you!!

What did you do? What worked?

[deleted]