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Don’t Mess with The Google

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Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#411

Post by setq »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #393
setq wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contacting Google support, unless you're an Apps customer which I wasn't, is a complete waste of time. Unless you can, to quote a colleague, piss through the eye of a needle, when it comes to the security questions and details then you can't even get over the first hurdle.

From any situation where your account has been disabled, I've seen a grand total of two positive resolution strategies: - Get a lawyer and have them contact. - Know a Googler personally.

Any product which relies on knowing someone at the company or a good lawyer should be marked instantly as suspect! :)

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#412

Post by tyingq »

Figs wrote: post #280
whyagaindavid wrote: post #183

1. Why is everyone here condoning the act of these people to make _extra_ money? 2. If you are doing such shady stuff create a new Gmail account and do it

Regarding question 1: (1) Because the First Sale Doctrine is supposed to give people the right to resell their legally acquired goods. Retaliating against people who resell something they paid for already is extremely bad form on Google's part, even if they have found a tortuous way to legally do so. (2) Regardless of whether Google was justified or legally within their rights to do so, cutting off people's email wit…

>cutting off people's email with no warning is alarming.

And, by cutting off the google account, they may have cut off other critical services for that customer. Off the top of my head:

- Google Authenticator 2FA (ouch, that could be messy)

- Google Voice, to the point where you might lose the phone number.

- Adwords, Adsense, Appspot, GCE, Google Domains, etc

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#413

Post by setq »

icebraining wrote: post #405
distances wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sent via the email provider, but I'm using clients that can set a custom "From" and/or "Reply-To" header fields, containing of course the redirecting address.

Thanks for your answer. What about DKIM? Are you forgoing it, or do your clients have support for signing the emails?

As an anecdote, I've never used DKIM or even SPF and have no delivery problems from my domain.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#414

Post by scholia »

smonff wrote: post #312
setq wrote: post #170

First post, might as well be a cautionary tale. My father, a pretty old programmer by anyone's standards, regularly warns me of this sort of thing. He was pretty much shafted by CompuServe many years ago on a miniscule scale compared to what is possible now. He lives his life in what I previously described as a paranoid bubble of data control. Until I inevitably burned myself with Google. I have no idea what happened…

The way Google made us used to transform an email box as a storage and backup place is terrifying. Sending 2Mo attachments become a norm[1] and lots of people consider having their life stored there. It just seem not sustainable. If you would do this with paper in the past, your place would just be full of junk. Our cloud life is an horrific stack of garbage. We just don't need most of the things we store, keeping ev…

> transform an email box as a storage and backup place ... and lots of people consider having their life stored there.

That might be viable if Google had kept its promise about users never having to delete their emails. As it is, the total capacity (shared with Gdrive) is 15GB, which wouldn't be much of a life.

I was one of the first Gmail users outside Google and got to 14.99GB some time ago, just with email. And I delete loads of it.

But I don't worry too much about losing Gmail. First, all incoming email is forwarded to an Outlook.com mailbox (which never complains about lack of space). Second, I use my own domain name. As long as I never forget to renew that, I should be OK....

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#415

Post by digi_owl »

Didn't some kid get their email shut down because they were under the age for having a G+ account?

It is insane how coarse grained Google is regarding all this. You would think they could shut down one part of the account without killing the whole account.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#416

Post by distances »

icebraining wrote: post #405
distances wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sent via the email provider, but I'm using clients that can set a custom "From" and/or "Reply-To" header fields, containing of course the redirecting address.

Thanks for your answer. What about DKIM? Are you forgoing it, or do your clients have support for signing the emails?

To be frank I haven't even thought to consider DKIM, so I guess it's fair to say it hasn't been a problem. This is a private e-mail address with quite low number of outgoing e-mails, so hard to say how universal my experience on this is.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#417

Post by jdietrich »

fest wrote: post #327
jdietrich wrote: post #118

Rule Zero: Never rely on a URL that you don't control. Use your own domain name for your e-mail addresses. Use your own domain name for canonical links to content. If you control the URLs, you do not depend on any one provider. Rule One: If you only have one copy, you have no copies. It is an act of faith to assume that a Youtube video or a file in Google Drive will remain available, just as it's an act of faith to a…

Can you access Nearline (Google Cloud product) when your google account is suspended?

I was referring to nearline in the generic sense; I was unaware that Google had a product with that (rather confusing) name.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#418

Post by flanbiscuit »

SonicSoul wrote: post #374
setq wrote: post #170

First post, might as well be a cautionary tale. My father, a pretty old programmer by anyone's standards, regularly warns me of this sort of thing. He was pretty much shafted by CompuServe many years ago on a miniscule scale compared to what is possible now. He lives his life in what I previously described as a paranoid bubble of data control. Until I inevitably burned myself with Google. I have no idea what happened…

thanks for posting this cautionary tale. I am completely dependent on Google today so if that happened i'd be F'd. Will look into exporting all my emails this weekend. But why was Google unable to re-instate you? Was it because you had no way to prove your identity to them? Were you able to reach anyone? for those in similar situation you can back up your email/calendar here: https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeo…

It would be great if someone put together a guide on how to migrate from a closed source systems (e.g. gmail, google drive, dropbox, etc) to open source systems. One with detailed, but easy to follow, instructions.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#419

Post by jdietrich »

hellofunk wrote: post #211
jdietrich wrote: post #118

Rule Zero: Never rely on a URL that you don't control. Use your own domain name for your e-mail addresses. Use your own domain name for canonical links to content. If you control the URLs, you do not depend on any one provider. Rule One: If you only have one copy, you have no copies. It is an act of faith to assume that a Youtube video or a file in Google Drive will remain available, just as it's an act of faith to a…

This is the opposite advice I've heard after reading about scenarios like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7141532

The fault in that case lies entirely with GoDaddy's poor security. Use a competent registrar, preferably one that supports 2FA with a hardware token.

https://konklone.com/post/protect-your-domain-name-with-two-...

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#420

Post by Pigo »

kajecounterhack wrote: post #120

Disclaimer: I don't speak for Google and don't have any real context into why this occurred. Speaking as myself, a private citizen. I work in Spam & Abuse and it's possible that this is the result of some clustering algorithm that was trying to take down sharders / phone buying rings. It's very possible that the SWEs responsible didn't consider this possibility (that legitimate customers would be used to shard purcha…

Honestly, I feel like if you start trying to game the system with some shady practices, you should be ready for eventualities like this. That's almost as careless as putting your real info up on an .onion site, and almost exactly like torrenting without any kind of proxy. I hope they get off with a warning, but these people were up to some shenanigans.
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