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Ask HN: How do I get my Google account back?

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Re: Ask HN: How do I get my Google account back?

#111

Post by mindslight »

donthellbanme wrote: post #83
sigmoid10 wrote: post #24

>Unfortunately I did not have a phone number associated with this account. My understanding is I would have been able to recover my account, If I had one. It boggles my mind how people can have their entire life tied to this service and not connect a phone number, especially since google regularly warns you during login that this can happen if you don't add your number. They even ask to confirm every now and then in…

Some people can't afford a a smart phone, and rely just on a landline, sometimes one phone for an entire home. We need a federal law that two factor authencation needs to work on landlines. The technology is there. It's not expensive either.

Why not a law that prohibits companies making people jump through any of these arbitrary hoops in the name of "security" to begin with? Authentication requirements should be straightforwardly understandable, future-predictable, and fully changeable by the user. Not opaque, always changing, and top-down set by the company for their version of "security". This goes doubly when there is no customer service to sort things out with.

PS stop validating their top-down model by referring to SMS nags as "2FA". It's snake oil for the corporate motive of demanding identifying information.

Re: Ask HN: How do I get my Google account back?

#112

Post by kettleballroll »

mbirth wrote: post #97
dmd wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really really want to do this but am stuck on Gmail because of their spam filtering. Is there ANY other provider that does spam filtering that actually works? I tried Fastmail, but I receive so much spam (>600 per day vs. ~20 non-spam per day) that only Gmail's spam filtering is good enough. I've tried others (like Fastmail) and typically ~50/day get through their spam filters, vs. at Gmail where on a typical day 1…

Get a domain. Then get an email provider that allows unlimited aliases (I'm using German UberSpace). Then start setting up unique email addresses for each service, e.g. ycombinator.com-abcd@yourdomain.com . The "abcd" part should be random for each service so it's impossible to guess your other email addresses. I also use yearly throwaway addresses, e.g. 2022abcd@yourdomain.com, for when I need an email address witho…

I've done the same, but apparently no one ever sells my email. Did your effort ever pay off?

Re: Ask HN: How do I get my Google account back?

#113

Post by j4tech »

ttybird2 wrote: post #100
sigmoid10 wrote: post #24

>Unfortunately I did not have a phone number associated with this account. My understanding is I would have been able to recover my account, If I had one. It boggles my mind how people can have their entire life tied to this service and not connect a phone number, especially since google regularly warns you during login that this can happen if you don't add your number. They even ask to confirm every now and then in…

"especially since google regularly warns you during login that this can happen if you don't add your number" All of this is so that they can mine phone numbers for older accounts. Now they require a phone number by default. It makes sense to add a way to recover access to your account if you fear that you may forget your password. It makes no sense to give google your phone number just in case they may out of nowhere…

I was NEVER prompted for a phone number or given a warning that I will not be able to access my account if I didnt have one. (Maybe because i already had one on the account and removed it?. Not sure). However, off and on , google would prompt me for my recovery email and I had no problem accessing my account using that.

Re: Ask HN: How do I get my Google account back?

#114

Post by Froedlich »

Daedren wrote: post #39
orblivion wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I've been warned by security conscious people never to use phone number as a 2FA because it's so insecure, and using it as a recovery option seems to create an even weaker link. If that's somehow not true, I haven't gotten around to figuring out why that is because I only have so much time for this shit.

Google allows for various kinds of 2FA, not just SMS. You can use a hardware key or even Google apps installed on other trusted devices.

Not for all accounts. After several years, they started strongly recommending an SMS verification, then finally locked my account when I couldn't provide them one. [I have SMS turned off by my cellular provider] Every year or so I'll see if I can get back in. Sometimes I'm presented with a non-SMS option, but once I work through that, they go right back to insisting on SMS.

I only used that account for communicating with one friend, [our mail hosts were blocking each other in some kind of spam war tit-for-tat] now deceased, so it was no great loss to lose the account, but rather annoying that they pretend harvesting phone numbers is some type of "authentication."

Re: Ask HN: How do I get my Google account back?

#115

Post by nerdzero »

kettleballroll wrote: post #112
mbirth wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get a domain. Then get an email provider that allows unlimited aliases (I'm using German UberSpace). Then start setting up unique email addresses for each service, e.g. ycombinator.com-abcd@yourdomain.com . The "abcd" part should be random for each service so it's impossible to guess your other email addresses. I also use yearly throwaway addresses, e.g. 2022abcd@yourdomain.com, for when I need an email address witho…

I've done the same, but apparently no one ever sells my email. Did your effort ever pay off?

I've been doing this for years and have had maybe 4 addresses compromised out of a couple hundred.

Re: Ask HN: How do I get my Google account back?

#116

Post by Froedlich »

dmd wrote: post #47
MrPatan wrote: post #37

I can't help the OP, but I can help you, gmail user reading this: This WILL happen to you. Get your own domain and set up email through it ASAP. Use some free one, use a paid one (I like fastmail), but get it done now. Then migrate all your accounts to it.

I really really want to do this but am stuck on Gmail because of their spam filtering. Is there ANY other provider that does spam filtering that actually works? I tried Fastmail, but I receive so much spam (>600 per day vs. ~20 non-spam per day) that only Gmail's spam filtering is good enough. I've tried others (like Fastmail) and typically ~50/day get through their spam filters, vs. at Gmail where on a typical day 1…

> but apparently nobody else can do spam filtering. . I've experienced the opposite; I had to abandon one paid mail host because they turned their spam filtering up to "Thunderstruck!" I was getting about every third message on mailing lists, and other mail seemed to be about 50/50. They had drunk the Kool-Aid from whoever sold them the software, and claimed they couldn't whitelist or turn it off per-account, and I should be grateful that half of my legitimate mail was going into the bit bucket.

Re: Ask HN: How do I get my Google account back?

#117

Post by mbirth »

kettleballroll wrote: post #112
mbirth wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get a domain. Then get an email provider that allows unlimited aliases (I'm using German UberSpace). Then start setting up unique email addresses for each service, e.g. ycombinator.com-abcd@yourdomain.com . The "abcd" part should be random for each service so it's impossible to guess your other email addresses. I also use yearly throwaway addresses, e.g. 2022abcd@yourdomain.com, for when I need an email address witho…

I've done the same, but apparently no one ever sells my email. Did your effort ever pay off?

Yes, various times. Mostly LinkedIn and a few other services that vanished but seemingly sold their userdata. And 2 or 3 times I've got spam before the company announced that they got hacked.

Re: Ask HN: How do I get my Google account back?

#118

Post by dmd »

kettleballroll wrote: post #110
dmd wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really really want to do this but am stuck on Gmail because of their spam filtering. Is there ANY other provider that does spam filtering that actually works? I tried Fastmail, but I receive so much spam (>600 per day vs. ~20 non-spam per day) that only Gmail's spam filtering is good enough. I've tried others (like Fastmail) and typically ~50/day get through their spam filters, vs. at Gmail where on a typical day 1…

I always assumed spam filtering is a solved problem, imnevernhad any issues with eg protonmail once I've trained it on a significant body (eg all my current spam). Im curious, how many positive/negative samples have you used/how much time have you given the system to adapt?

The last time I gave it a serious try, back in 2019, I gave it ~120000 non-spam samples (several years of real emails) and ~25000 spam samples (1 month of spam).

After that it was getting about 5% false-positive (so 1 in 20 real emails went to spam) and about 3% false-negative. For me, 3% false negative means 25 spams to inbox a day.

Gmail gives me about 0.5% false positive (1 in 200) and 0.01% false negatives.

Re: Ask HN: How do I get my Google account back?

#120

Post by pindakaas »

Hallucinaut wrote: post #91
pindakaas wrote: post #68

This question pops up a lot on HN. From what I've read in similar posts, you'd have a hard time getting your account back even if you'd work at Google. Sadly, having your phone number not associated with the account will make recovery extra hard. To their credit, Google does provide multiple ways to set up account recovery (e.g., recovery codes).

Unfortunately this is not accurate advice as someone who has gone through the Kafkaesque recovery system under duress can attest, recovery codes, 2FA via authenticator, confirming via the recovery email address, "trying again after 48hours - 2 weeks", logging in from the same IP as linked accounts, etc. all fail to work if you lose your phone number (as I did with a prepay number once).

You shouldn't have set up email recovery using a prepaid phone number ;-). Although, to be fair, Google should have only used your backup recovery email (or whatever else you have set up and prefer to use).
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