121–130 of 151 posts
I hate this. If I know the password I should be able to log in to my account no matter what (unless if I have 2fa enabled). Sadly companies like Google and MS do not like this idea, they also often use the excuse that they can't verify you in order to mine your phone number. "Edit: Account recovered. I used chromium to login (which I never do) and then back to Firefox" How can google keep getting away with this? MS g…
Fixed. I used Chromium to login (which I never do) and then back to Firefox. Everything back to normal, for now.
So I have also had this happen to me in the past which was one of the reasons I abandoned gmail completely. Am I understanding this right that you had the correct password but no 2FA authentication and somehow a Firefox user agent on Linux triggered google mail servers to shut you out? I never really tried with chromium perhaps I can still retrieve old data (Google Support was obviously non existing on this issue).
I hate this. If I know the password I should be able to log in to my account no matter what (unless if I have 2fa enabled). Sadly companies like Google and MS do not like this idea, they also often use the excuse that they can't verify you in order to mine your phone number. "Edit: Account recovered. I used chromium to login (which I never do) and then back to Firefox" How can google keep getting away with this? MS g…
Google denying me access to YouTube videos asking me to verify my age by giving them either my passport or my credit card should be illegal as well. Then they expanded it to the app store - some apps, even ones that don't seem to need to be age restricted - now require I verify my age in the same way. I just give them the middle finger and manually install the APKs for those apps. Unfortunately, no way to get around…
This story keeps coming up. When you pay for email, you get a customer status. This entails a SLA and a bunch of other rights, which you most likely never get from a free service provider. I hope if those reading these comments still use free email service instead of hosting their own (or paying for it), strongly consider making the switch.
There is Google Workplace where you pay $5/month/user for a google account including email and there is support
It's a very bad idea if you want to use the account as a Google account. i.e. smart home does not work, lots of user features do not work, there is no workaround to this other than "don't use a Google Workplace account for personal life things, get a Gmail account".
Example of the pain to try and migrate from Workplace to Gmail just to get the workaround working: https://medium.com/@buro9/one-account-all-of-google-4d292906...
Fixed. I used Chromium to login (which I never do) and then back to Firefox. Everything back to normal, for now.
So I have also had this happen to me in the past which was one of the reasons I abandoned gmail completely. Am I understanding this right that you had the correct password but no 2FA authentication and somehow a Firefox user agent on Linux triggered google mail servers to shut you out? I never really tried with chromium perhaps I can still retrieve old data (Google Support was obviously non existing on this issue).
This story keeps coming up. When you pay for email, you get a customer status. This entails a SLA and a bunch of other rights, which you most likely never get from a free service provider. I hope if those reading these comments still use free email service instead of hosting their own (or paying for it), strongly consider making the switch.
There is Google Workplace where you pay $5/month/user for a google account including email and there is support
By far a better email service and the 2fa just works.
This story keeps coming up. When you pay for email, you get a customer status. This entails a SLA and a bunch of other rights, which you most likely never get from a free service provider. I hope if those reading these comments still use free email service instead of hosting their own (or paying for it), strongly consider making the switch.
So unless you're rich enough to be able to pay for premium status, you don't deserve a reliable email address—something that is absolutely required to be able to operate in the modern world?
To give a baseline: I pay for email hosting through a reputable non-Google company. It costs me about $40 a year, for both the domain name and the email hosting, and it didn't require me to have any technical knowledge to set up. Compare that with, for example, my cell phone plan (around $100 a year) and it seems pretty affordable, or at least comparable to other common bills.
I think it's helpful to think of this in terms of other utility services. People tend to agree that heat, electricity, phone, etc. should be accessible to the non-rich. But those still cost money to operate, and the cost is paid by consumers. (There can be a broader discussion around who should pay for this, but the money does come from somewhere.)
If we decided that electricity could be free, but that it would be funded through personal data collection, that you could permanently lose access at any time, and that you wouldn't be able to get outages fixed in a timely manner, that most people would prefer the current model.
The bottom line is that email is pretty important to modern life, similar to a phone. One way to ensure that your email is reliable is to pay for it.
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> If you value your digital history, host your mail and file at a party where you pay for the service - that makes you a customer not a product And then the hosting company has a fire in their datacenter and there’s someone on HN saying it’s still your fault because you needed to do backups as well. And then you have a backup issue and there’s someone on HN saying it’s still your fault for some other reason. https://…
There is always someone on HN willing to blame the victim and excuse, or at least shrug at, the bad behaviour of trillion dollar tech companies.
Tech megacorps often behave badly yes. But what can we realistically do about it? Discussing that just puts into yet another pointless political argument. Even in the best case situation it may take a decade to actually do anything, assuming whatever gets done actually works the way we hoped.
Maybe we should do something like that one of these days. But meanwhile, the OP has an actual problem right now. They would probably appreciate something they can directly do to fix it now or ensure it doesn't happen, instead of moving the discussion to the 50 billionth political argument on the internet that does nothing to help them.
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It's not user agent, it's session (cookies, localStorage) that they didn't have in Firefox, but still had in Chromium. And this isn't Google specific at all.
But they just said they cleared cookies. Also I travel a fair share (used to) and never faced any issues with any other services except gmail. It's too stringent to assume the same machine/storage/ip are always used.
Firefox didn't work, because person deleted session and didn't have second factor (nor backup auth methods). Chromium worked, because it still had device session.
I'm traveling and using TOR and VPNs just like everybody else and haven't faced any issues. There most definitely is a problem with communicating security/accessibility tradeoffs to the public though, so I'm not putting blame on the op here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So I have also had this happen to me in the past which was one of the reasons I abandoned gmail completely. Am I understanding this right that you had the correct password but no 2FA authentication and somehow a Firefox user agent on Linux triggered google mail servers to shut you out? I never really tried with chromium perhaps I can still retrieve old data (Google Support was obviously non existing on this issue).
What do you use instead of gmail ?