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I got locked out of my Google account for a month

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Re: I got locked out of my Google account for a month

#71

Post by crazygringo »

jsjohnst wrote: post #43
crazygringo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because what's the alternative? You can spend weeks moving all your data to Microsoft or Apple... and suffer lost messages when people don't update their e-mail for you... and then discover they're just as bad or worse? What's an alternative to Gmail+Drive+Apps that has as much functionality, ease of use and convenience, and at a comparable price, but guarantees you won't get locked out?

> What's an alternative It’s called paying for the services you use. You don’t even need to switch to a different product / provider, just pay $5/month and ~$10/year for a domain name. Then worst case scenario, you can move your domain off of Google Apps and not need to update your email address everywhere with everyone.

I don't think you read the article:

"They don’t have customer service, yet I’m paying for storage."

Re: I got locked out of my Google account for a month

#72

Post by Spooky23 »

perl4ever wrote: post #26
Shoothe wrote: post #2

> On December 5th, I sent a note to a PR contact who I work with on Google-related news and I told him about my problem. He said he had gotten my case escalated and I should hear within 24 hours. Sadly in all these stories that end successfully there is an inside help from someone that has contacts in Google. I don't even want to think about what would happen to people that don't know anyone inside Google.

I used my work email as my backup for my gmail account, and thus could not retrieve my password after I left that job (on good terms even, but they would not let me use my old email). Having access to my android phone tied to the gmail account helped not at all. I tried the gmail password retrieval system repeatedly, but could not get it to recognize me even though I had an archive of much of my email, so I thought I…

I have a similar situation with my cable company. I have a mail account that I used like 20 years ago that still gets mail, but I can only access it by copying a cookie to my browser.

According to the cable company, the account does not exist. Somehow between the multiple mergers, it keeps getting migrated but is orphaned from their identity system.

Re: I got locked out of my Google account for a month

#73

Post by jschwartzi »

oxplot wrote: post #33

> Imagine you have spent much of your digital life for the last 12 years on Google. You rely on their mail and calendar, Google Drive for storage and Google Photos for your photo archive. Like I've said in the past here [1], if something is so important to you, you need to treat it as such. Continuing to use a service that offers no guarantees, availability or even continuing access to your account is a sign of ignor…

You don't have to use the business option. There's a paid subscription for $5 a month that has the same level of support.

Being able to call someone means you can tie up a $20/hour resource until you can log back in to your account.

Re: I got locked out of my Google account for a month

#75

Post by x0x0 »

omarforgotpwd wrote: post #12

In the era of cloud services, if it's not on your hard drive you could ultimately lose access to it at any time. People tend to think about reasons like companies shutting down services, getting acquired, etc. but this brings up an entirely new class of ways you could lose access to your cloud info: Locking yourself out. Maybe you forgot the password, your password manager had a bug, or the account was with an old sc…

I worked for a large b2c website.

Many users used the password recovery flow essentially as their login mechanism.

Seriously.

Re: I got locked out of my Google account for a month

#76

Post by lxchase »

ortekk wrote: post #62
Shoothe wrote: post #2

> On December 5th, I sent a note to a PR contact who I work with on Google-related news and I told him about my problem. He said he had gotten my case escalated and I should hear within 24 hours. Sadly in all these stories that end successfully there is an inside help from someone that has contacts in Google. I don't even want to think about what would happen to people that don't know anyone inside Google.

My AdWords account got locked a few years back. It was my first attempt to try AdWords on my website. I've loaded around $20 and it almost immediately got locked (not a single ad was shown/clicked). I could never unlock it or retrieve my money from it. So Google has my 20 dollars now.

I recently got a letter in the mail (from EY if I recall correctly) who on behalf of Google, asked me if I wanted to collect the unused balance from an inactive account (with options on how to receive said funds), otherwise it will go to your states' unclaimed funds. Perhaps check there to see if it got sent there?

Re: I got locked out of my Google account for a month

#77

Post by Tempest1981 »

epistasis wrote: post #20
mgiannopoulos wrote: post #3

Scary. Makes me think about moving my personal mail domain back to a regular hosting company

Fastmail is great for this, in my opinion. I vastly prefer every single aspect of the experience. The web mail client alone is worth the switch away from Gmail, IMHO.

How does Fastmail handle lost passwords?

Re: I got locked out of my Google account for a month

#78

Post by lucaspiller »

x0x0 wrote: post #75
omarforgotpwd wrote: post #12

In the era of cloud services, if it's not on your hard drive you could ultimately lose access to it at any time. People tend to think about reasons like companies shutting down services, getting acquired, etc. but this brings up an entirely new class of ways you could lose access to your cloud info: Locking yourself out. Maybe you forgot the password, your password manager had a bug, or the account was with an old sc…

I worked for a large b2c website. Many users used the password recovery flow essentially as their login mechanism. Seriously.

So why not take advantage of that... instead of passwords just email the user a link they need to press to login.

Re: I got locked out of my Google account for a month

#79

Post by interfixus »

> Ron Miller is enterprise reporter at TechCrunch. He has been a Freelance Technology Journalist since 1998

> Ron is currently corporate blogger for Intronis where he writes once weekly on issues related to the cloud, and a weekly feature called The Cloud 5 where he aggregates five links related to the cloud computing

Might we perhaps have expected a slightly better understanding of the nature of the cloud? Of 'free' services? Of standard backup practice? Of password managers? Of password security? (Guy apparently used passwords simple enough that he could carry them in his head). It probably makes me a smug, uncaring bunghole, but my compassion doesn't really kick into gear over this.

I have had the pleasure of working with the user database of a certain media company. Passwords in plaintext, of course. Plenty of journalist users. Half of whom had gmail adresses for usernames, and 90% of whom had passwords along the lines of [birthday], [name], or kitty74.

Yes, there were tech people too.

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