461–470 of 499 posts
Gmail is not that great anyway, it’s too heavy to use their webmail and using IMAP is a major pain due to their stupid labels and not having real folders.
It's incredibly Kafka-eqsue that you get banned for a supposed violation that you're supposed to appeal, but you don't know what you're being accused of doing. This is exacerbated by the fact that 9 out of 10 times a story like this appears it's an algorithm gone rogue which its billion-dollar shepherd assumes is infallible. The remaining 1 time it's because someone knows how to abuse reporting systems to get someone…
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> The remaining 1 time it's because someone knows how to abuse reporting systems to get someone locked out on purpose. My Twitter account got disabled many months ago due to "suspicious activity". I did not do anything. At the time I talked to someone with whom I disagreed respectfully on a CS-related subject and was not political. Next thing that happens is that it asks me to verify via phone and only then I am able…
Twitter routinely disables accounts for "suspicious activity" as a scummy way to harvest phone numbers (despite the account supposedly being considered dangerous and in breach of the ToS, simply providing a phone number immediately restores it without any human review).
Every time a "Google banned my account" thread comes up, I like to point out that my Google Adwords account was banned once. I filed an appeal. It's been 20 years this month, I'm still waiting for a response.
One account from the middle of the batch, while I was the _only_ one with access and definitely had not done anything unusual with it (and certainly nothing we hadn't done with the other half dozen accounts) was banned before we could provide it to the client.
I opened a ticket with the accounts team and didn't get a reply. I escalated through our AdWords contact since account support was, as expected, useless. Figured given overall our company spent millions a year maybe they could at least get this looked at. They were apologetic, but realistic in telling us that there was basically nothing that could be done and it was unlikely anyone would ever respond to the ticket so we should probably just register another Google account and cross our fingers that one didn't get banned.
Found the old email the other day. Just passed 6 years with no response from the accounts team.
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> I have been thinking about this for a while. Considering I prefer to keep the important data/emails on Gmail or Google drive for security and I really consider it important. Would it help if Google had a paid tier? It wouldn't, because Google is averse to any kind of customer support even for paying services. Even the "support" people that get attached to highly paid YouTube, GSuite, and other accounts get regularl…
Fully agree. I have a small business that spends 2k/y on Adwords, and support is an absolute joke. I have a significant stake in another that spends 50k/y, and support is the same - terrible. And it's even a challenge to get the bad support - you've got to hunt and jump through hoops to get to communicate with an actual human. I've heard support is much better for GCP - but for me, the whole Google brand is tarnished…
However the reps were pretty up front that as soon as a support issue crossed the line onto any other team at Google... you best just figure out a workaround, because even once we'd already crossed the threshold and had someone inside Google working on our behalf, there was just nothing that could be done.
And yeah, this has led me to be extremely resistant to moving _any_ infrastructure we care about to GCP. I have zero faith my account won't just be suddenly banned one day with no effective recourse. And I'd also never recommend any "paid support" option they offered like some people are suggesting they provide, because I'd have no faith in their support team being able to actually solve the sorts of issues that are hard for people to solve on their own.
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Fastmail. But the key thing is using my own domain name . You can actually use Gmail safely... as long as you are using your own domain name. If Google (or Fastmail) terminated my account, I could point my domain name to another mail service, and not lose access to any of my other services. But as long as you're using an @gmail.com address as your digital identity, your access to all of your online accounts is tied u…
> But the key thing is using my own domain name. Then the trust is placed in your registrar. Maybe that's where the trust should be placed from your perspective, but do note that you're still choosing to trust another organization who's interests may not totally align with yours.
The likelihood of loosing a domainname in my country (Germany) is fairly low unless you used it to actively (and provably) spread malware or commit other crimes (and your registrar will have to prove it and better hope they filed a police report, or their cancellation goes poof).
I remember, long, long ago (2011) there was a similar story about a Google account that was banned, and Matt Cutts himself looked into it and came back with a boring, corporate, legalease answer that was most unlike him. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2795465 The underlying reason in that instance, was the mistaken identification of childporn. https://nhwn.wordpress.com/2011/07/28/the-thomas-monopoly-af...
That’s some nostalgia for me, used to read almost every post of his blog. I see his last post was about an year back.
They're begging for the European legislation to require mobility of email addresses as we have for mobile phone numbers.
How would that work on a technical level? Phone numbers are just sequential numbers, that are assigned to carriers, when consumers transfer numbers the carriers just re-assign ownership via an assignment swap. An email address by contrast is an undefined/minimally defined identifier in front of an @ and the message is just thrown to the domain to do something with. Which is to say, mobility is impossible, because the…
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That's wild, we're a fairly small Azure customer (compared to others) and I get calls and emails every month from a rep asking us what they can do, if anything. I think Microsoft is maybe a bit smarter at this by connecting sales to CSMs, because they can up sell and get you to support if you need it. While with Google it's a big shell game.
Azure was down in Australia one night and I randomly sent a tweet to microsoft. To my pleasant surprise they acted on it and resolved it in few minutes. this is the same microsoft that was the villain around 10 years ago
While the rest of MS is improving those 2 teams are still a problem, the "cloud" is ripe with ways to obfuscate and needlessly complicate licensing to over charge companies and MS excels at that