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Ask HN: I'm a small business and Google locked me out

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Re: Ask HN: I'm a small business and Google locked me out

#61

Post by gorbachev »

cyral wrote: post #47

Somewhat related... At our company we once deleted a G Suite account that had a balance on its AdSense account. They let us delete the account with a click of a button without checking if all the associated accounts for other Google products should actually be deleted. So we received a letter that the account was sent to collections, but there was no way to login and pay the bill because the account didn't exist anym…

Yahoo is/was the same.

I deleted my Yahoo (email) account, but they didn't delete the Yahoo Groups account tied to that account.

I couldn't access Yahoo Groups, but I was still receiving Yahoo Groups messages on all groups I'd set it to forward posts to my email or notify me of things. No way to unsubscribe or change settings.

Re: Ask HN: I'm a small business and Google locked me out

#62

Post by hysan »

zozbot234 wrote: post #37
40four wrote: post #29

A few years back, I got locked out of my primary gmail account due to a 2 factor authentication SNAFU. I was never able to recover it. I tried to go through the appropriate support channels more than once. Filled out extensive forms, even identified recent emails like they asked, to no avail. It was very disappointing, considering I had spent a good amount of money purchasing apps/ games etc. with that account. What…

2 factor authentication (w/ security tokens, mobile "apps" etc.) comes with an inherent risk of getting locked out of stuff. Most of the time you can mitigate that risk by generating "recovery" codes in advance, but it's still something to be aware of.

While true, this is more of a Google problem than a 2FA problem.

Google will lock you out of your account even without 2FA if it cannot recognize you. It happened to me on a Google Apps account that does not have 2FA.[1] Customer service should be present to handle edge cases.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21168834

Re: Ask HN: I'm a small business and Google locked me out

#64

Post by filmgirlcw »

amelius wrote: post #45
ijidak wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently learned about takeout.google.com to backup your Google everything! So happy they provide this service!

If only I could put it into my crontab ...

You can’t automate it with cron, but Google Takeout does let you schedule exports every two months (six a year), and you can choose to have the file added to a cloud drive or have a download link emailed. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than it was. For mail, there are some really good command-line backup implementations that’s you can automate with cron. When I worked in a GSuite workplace, I used gmvault to backup my inbox every week (IMAP would work too but I was paranoid and my inbox was crucial to my job). Apparently there is now a better alternative than that but for mail anyway — and likely files in GDrive — there are options.

Re: Ask HN: I'm a small business and Google locked me out

#65

Post by dhosek »

gorbachev wrote: post #61
cyral wrote: post #47

Somewhat related... At our company we once deleted a G Suite account that had a balance on its AdSense account. They let us delete the account with a click of a button without checking if all the associated accounts for other Google products should actually be deleted. So we received a letter that the account was sent to collections, but there was no way to login and pay the bill because the account didn't exist anym…

Yahoo is/was the same. I deleted my Yahoo (email) account, but they didn't delete the Yahoo Groups account tied to that account. I couldn't access Yahoo Groups, but I was still receiving Yahoo Groups messages on all groups I'd set it to forward posts to my email or notify me of things. No way to unsubscribe or change settings.

Well at least now that Yahoo has shut down groups, that problem has gone away.

Re: Ask HN: I'm a small business and Google locked me out

#67

Post by glitchc »

luckylion wrote: post #38
glitchc wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s obvious that Google doesn’t want to incur the cost of client support staff.

I'm sure that lots of people would be happy to pay good money for plenty of support issues if that meant not having to use the terrible Google help pages and issue forms, and not having to wait a week or ten for a response.

Agreed. It's the main reason why I've refrained from using Google for business activities, otherwise it would be a no-brainer. If something breaks, I need to be able to call or email someone and receive a response within 24 hours. Anything else is just not tenable from a reliability perspective.

Re: Ask HN: I'm a small business and Google locked me out

#68

Post by dmoy »

luckylion wrote: post #38
glitchc wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s obvious that Google doesn’t want to incur the cost of client support staff.

I'm sure that lots of people would be happy to pay good money for plenty of support issues if that meant not having to use the terrible Google help pages and issue forms, and not having to wait a week or ten for a response.

This user is explicitly not paying for that old account. If you do pay for an account, you can get slightly better support.

But the account in question is closed for non-payment.

Re: Ask HN: I'm a small business and Google locked me out

#69

Post by kabdib »

gambler wrote: post #57
40four wrote: post #29

A few years back, I got locked out of my primary gmail account due to a 2 factor authentication SNAFU. I was never able to recover it. I tried to go through the appropriate support channels more than once. Filled out extensive forms, even identified recent emails like they asked, to no avail. It was very disappointing, considering I had spent a good amount of money purchasing apps/ games etc. with that account. What…

>A few year back, I got locked out of my primary gmail account due to a 2 factor authentication SNAFU. I was never able to recover it. This is the downside (or hidden cost) of 2FA that most security experts purposefully ignore, because they work for companies like Google and only care about account security rather than user security .

I did a 2FA system a while back.

The happy login path and crypto work took a couple of days, and the mobile app work was similarly easy. Probably 80% of the effort was working through account recovery and other support-related issues.

Re: Ask HN: I'm a small business and Google locked me out

#70

Post by edoceo »

jtwaleson wrote: post #41
edoceo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hold on. I'm an admin on a few paid GApps things. One got locked out, removed me, switched phone numbers, made a mess. Then owner hit me for help, I went through the channels with G and we were back on in a few hours/next day. This was only three months ago. The process was largely automated, IIRC there was one 15 minute call.

Sure, documentation & automation works for the majority of cases. The problem is with the other cases where you hit a wall and have no way to talk to a customer service rep to get your issue resolved.

So I'm clear: we hit walls using the normal process. It was abnormal from my prior experience too. Then it was escalated and a CSR called me. Then the issue was resolved.

I disagree specifically with the "no way to talk to" part.

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