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Ask HN: Gmail account security

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Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security

#661

Post by alexb_ »

dleslie wrote: post #502
graderjs wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess this is why Amazon is playing the long game with their obsessive focus on customers. I don't know how that really plays out where the rubber meets the road but that's what Jeff bezos always keeps talking about.

It plays out with Amazon absolutely crushing Google when it tried to be a consumer marketplace, and even trouncing Google at providing web infrastructure services. If, somehow, an antitrust ruling split ads from the rest of Google the non-ads remainder wouldn't last more than a few years.

Alphabet as a whole is an organization built by the immense money that comes from monopolizing digital advertising (through some very... unscrupulous means) and then run by people deluding themselves into thinking they can do anything else. There's a reason everything is "killed by google" - I'm not exactly sure anyone there knows how to do damn near anything that isn't propped up by investor hype and the money they make from ads and other strictly profitable ventures such as GCP. Alphabet only has the ability to do immensely stupid things because their core business gives them damn near infinite money to play with.

You are 100% correct in that ads are the ONLY thing propping up google as a business. This is probably a very bold prediction, but I think that when money starts getting more expensive, when rich billionaires are more reluctant to just throw money at inane, borderline speculative bullshit, there will be a massive hemorrhaging of unnecessary business. And maybe this is a little out there but... you know how YouTube doesn't actually make any fucking money?

Interesting things to think about for sure.

Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security

#662

Post by afandian »

scrollaway wrote: post #654
kikimora wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years back I wanted to call then but didn’t find a number. How do you contact Google’s support?

If you have a google workspace account and need google support, you can go in the admin console, help section in the top right, there is a contact form with phone and chat options.

What if you can't log in?

Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security

#663

Post by GoblinSlayer »

hansvm wrote: post #275
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #8

Had this. It was telling me to try again 'later'. Ok, i did 'try later' every day for three weeks, and they didn't let me in. Using the very same IP address as I used to always access it, no less. Then, I gave up, moved all my services to another email account, and after 2 or 3 months tried logging in, and it suddenly allowed me to log in. Needless to say, I will never again use gmail for critically important things.

Not just Google, I'm regularly locked out of banks, state resources, and all kinds of other shit because of various combinations of bad decisions producing toxic login flows. One of my personal favorites -- a bank automatically associated phone numbers you called them from to the account, and later they forced SMS 2FA onto the account regardless of any other security you had in place (and of course made the common mi…

If they need only SMS for a takeover, it's 1fa, not 2fa.

Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security

#664

Post by tsm »

kelnos wrote: post #332
alerighi wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My solution is, buy your own domain. It's cheap and it will cost you only 20$ a year or something like that. I'm not saying run your own email service (I do, but I recognize that it's complex and not worth for most people), but use a public email service (like also GMail) with your own domain. That way at least if you no longer can access your account, or you get banned, or whatever, you don't loose your address (sin…

I agree with the advice to get your own domain, and then use a service to manage email for it. But don't use GSuite/Google Workspaces/whatever they're calling it now. Your Google account will be somewhat crippled and will be missing a bunch of features, because Google has just decided GSuite accounts should not have those features. And you can't convert your account to a regular Google account. I really want to untan…

> Google has decided to finally pull the rug out from under those of us who signed up for GSuite when it was free…and will start charging later this year.

Do you have a citation for this? I heard last year they were going to start charging for new accounts, but that since I set it up on my domain in 2008 I was grandfathered into the free plan indefinitely.

Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security

#665

Post by foxfluff »

rzz3 wrote: post #499
ngold wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer. I'm a new Google play thing, by giving them money. Just registered a website through them and am about to release a game on the playstore. Fully dependant on zero custom service now. The one thing I've never understood about google. Some sort of law for a trillion dollar company to have customer service or something. Google should be employing 10's of thousands of customer service employees to take calls…

More laws aren’t always the answer. Really, we should just be using a company that gives a shit about its users.

I don't think people are informed well enough to know which company gives a shit about its users. Google had pretty good reputation when I started first using GMail via an invite during the beta.

I agree more laws aren't always the answer but I really do think that companies should take some responsibility as far as customers' data and property is concerned. If I take my car to be serviced, they can't just tow it to a junkyard and tell me to fuck off. Even if they advertised free service. If you can't provide a free service and take responsibility for it, then don't.

IMO, if the service includes "borrowing" property (rent, email server), then they can't just cut the customer off without giving them time and the means to move off. (It would be illegal here for my landlord to step in and lock me out tomorrow)

Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security

#666

Post by throwaway55852 »

This is a long shot, but if you have a spare Android phone lying around consider doing a factory reset on it and signing in with that account during the initial setup.

My situation was somewhat different. I had a rarely-used account with no recovery email/phone. When I entered the password correctly using a web browser, I was asked to provide a (new) phone number so I could be sent a verification code before continuing. I didn't want to provide a phone number, so I tried to log in with that account during the initial setup of a freshly-reset Android phone and it worked (allowing me to add a recovery email).

I'm curious if this strategy helps in your case. (You mentioned getting a new phone, but I assume you are signing in on that phone after it has been set up, which may be different to signing in during the initial setup.)

By the way, in your reply to a comment on 2-factor authentication (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30051366) you said you had a recovery account. There is a difference between enabling Google's "2-Step Verification" and having a plain recovery email/phone (though from other comments it sounds like you can get locked out even with 2FA, and not all 2FA methods are equal).

P.S. If you want to allow people to contact you privately, consider adding some contact details to your HN profile.

Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security

#667

Post by cbsmith »

eitland wrote: post #562
cbsmith wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and the beauty of the Internet is that there's really no way to be sure people are being genuine...

Long time Firefox user and HNer here. I've at least been "captchaed" in Firefox. While being logged in with my Gmail account from 2005.

I've been "captchaed" with Chrome, so I'm not sure the anecdotes amount to much.

Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security

#668

Post by bamboozled »

steelframe wrote: post #445

Once upon a time I worked at Google. I returned to Austin to visit old friends and took the opportunity to visit the Google office there. The Googlers sitting around me were primarily corporate sales. They weren't getting any corporate sales calls at all as far as I could tell, but there was one extremely irate user who was locked out of their GMail account and was repeatedly calling them because they were the only h…

Once we were having trouble with GKE hosted in Asia, it was causing out business a major outage and it wasn't something which I had the power to fix, from memory, half way through a cluster upgrade, Google ran out of compute so the upgrade was stuck half and the control plane ended up in a bad state and some how this impacted the networking (it shouldn't but it happened). I was unable to provision a new cluster due to the lack of capacity so we were stuck.

This wasn't the first problem we'd had either.

There was absolutely no one to call, no one to even alert to warn other customers, the status pages were all green.

Instead of bothering with Google, I just opened an account on AWS and migrated whole stack to AWS in ~ 3 hours, pointed DNS at the new load balancers and we never went back and continued doing business without issue for as long as I can remember.

Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security

#669

Post by jadedtuna »

supermatou wrote: post #91

Yep, and it was even more aggravating. > have three gmail accounts > primary, name.surname@gmail.com > secondary, name.surname.purchases@gmail.com > tertiary, name.surname.work@gmail.com > secondary and tertiary have primary as a recovery address > log in/out once a week in 2nd and 3rd > last August, try to log into name.surname.work > "Password is incorrect" > WTH?! of course it's correct. > try several times, Googl…

I've had exactly the same issue before. The only way I could resolve it was by "confirming" my phone number. I didn't have a phone number connected to that account, but Google helpfully let me confirm it anyways (i.e. it just accepted the phone number as proof of me being me, despite never seeing that phone number before).

Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security

#670

Post by mkl »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #527
somehnguy wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same situation here. Have you done the research yet to decide on a new service, or are you planning on starting to pay? For me ideally I would like to move to something else (even paid) just because someday Google deciding to block me for whatever reason scares me quite a bit after having everything for the last decade attached to this account. I would like to export my emails, switch my domain to the new service, an…

I’ve been really happy with ProtonMail. I use their professional account with a catch-all email address on my domain, and I give each vendor I interact with their own dedicated email address (I.e. homedepot@mydomain.com, ticketmaster@mydomain.com, etc.) It lets me track who is sharing my email address and gives me control over that (set up simple filter to automatically delete any email received at ticketmaster@mydom…

That sounds pretty good. I do something similar but use POP and Thunderbird, which I'm looking to move away from. Does ProtonMail automatically set the From address when you start writing an email to a company you have a dedicated address for?
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