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Tell HN: I can't login to Gmail due to phone cannot be used for verification

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31–40 of 48 posts

Re: Tell HN: I can't login to Gmail due to phone cannot be used for verification

#31

I lost my work Gmail account several years ago due to this and vowed never to go back to Google. It was a slow decay, though, where over the course of a few months I just became less and less able to log in. (Unfortunately when I could log in, I couldn't do anything to change my recovery phone number to one I actually had access to because that triggered another verification round that I could not pass because I didn…

Do you have any recommendations for an alternative service?

Re: Tell HN: I can't login to Gmail due to phone cannot be used for verification

#32
post #24

Can we please ban these sorts of posts? This isn't news. People's news feeds are not the place for individual tech support problems. Take it to the Google community forum.

This is a web forum, not a news agency. And I personally find the discussion on these sorts of posts interesting and informative.

Re: Tell HN: I can't login to Gmail due to phone cannot be used for verification

#33
post #5

This phone verification shit is so awful. I have two friends who moved overseas and disconnected their cellphone plans without thinking about their MFA situation. Today I have to enforce MFA at the small company I'm working at, and just a month prior I held a cybersecurity seminar for them and explained that "phone MFA is… okay… but you should really use verification apps." But I didn't realize that you can't even en…

So I have used Authy, which apparently is somehow protocol compatible with Google Authenticator, and you can back up your tokens with a password. I got a new phone, installed the app, entered the password, and all my tokens were there.

I've moved from using Authy to Aegis Authenticator [0], it's open source and allows you to export an (optionally encrypted) backup of your OTP secrets offline. I trust that more than a cloud backup. Plus you can more easily migrate if Aegis ever goes unmaintained.

[0] https://getaegis.app/

Re: Tell HN: I can't login to Gmail due to phone cannot be used for verification

#34

I lost my work Gmail account several years ago due to this and vowed never to go back to Google. It was a slow decay, though, where over the course of a few months I just became less and less able to log in. (Unfortunately when I could log in, I couldn't do anything to change my recovery phone number to one I actually had access to because that triggered another verification round that I could not pass because I didn…

Do you have any recommendations for an alternative service?

I just went to Outlook for my work mail and cloud backups. My personal mail is with Fastmail, and I'd highly recommend them if all you need is mail.

Re: Tell HN: I can't login to Gmail due to phone cannot be used for verification

#35
post #24

Can we please ban these sorts of posts? This isn't news. People's news feeds are not the place for individual tech support problems. Take it to the Google community forum.

Pretty much any "Tell HN" is just someone complaining about something that the vasty majority of HN isn't affected by, can't do anything about, and doesn't care about.

Re: Tell HN: I can't login to Gmail due to phone cannot be used for verification

#36
post #24

Can we please ban these sorts of posts? This isn't news. People's news feeds are not the place for individual tech support problems. Take it to the Google community forum.

I encourage you to read the HN guidelines:

Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

Re: Tell HN: I can't login to Gmail due to phone cannot be used for verification

#37

I once changed my Gmail password and promptly forgot it. When I was trying to recover it, I had no MFA set up (I had a yubikey, but somehow that wasn't allowed???), so the only option left for me was to provide them with the month and year I created the account. Since it was roughly a 10 year old account, I had no idea what those numbers were. There was also no way to reach out to an actual human for help through the…

I find it interesting they didn't block you. Also, would this be affected by the latest changes at Twitter?

> I find it interesting they didn't block you.

It could be because I wasn't spamming them with tweets i.e. I only sent them about 14 tweets total between their two handles over the course of a week, but I can see how they might've blocked someone else doing the same.

> Also, would this be affected by the latest changes at Twitter?

Sorry, I'm not familiar with those changes, so I'm not sure.

Re: Tell HN: I can't login to Gmail due to phone cannot be used for verification

#38
post #19

What worked for me was to try it again from an IP I had logged in with before. For some reason it causes Gmail to not ask for a phone number verification. Once logged in I could change the phone number. Really stupid way to do it. No reason to lock someone out with the right password. A better alternative would be to show partial digits of an old number and ask you to complete it.

Yes, I solved it the same way (I no longer had access to my old phone number) and promptly setup google authenticator (well actually stored the totp string in 1password) and got backup codes.

I'm lucky that I have a server in the US that I regularly use as a VPN so I could try again from a known ip.

Re: Tell HN: I can't login to Gmail due to phone cannot be used for verification

#39

I kid you not. Google's actual official answer to this is... create another account![1][2][3] Edit: Now that I have your attention: PSA: Go create "Backup codes" for your Google Account in your 2-Step Verification settings. [1]: https://support.google.com/accounts/troubleshooter/2402620?h... [2]: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/7682439 [3]: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/7299973

Oh my, obviously not the solution we look for

MFA is rather neutered by "solutions" to losing access to your factors.

Re: Tell HN: I can't login to Gmail due to phone cannot be used for verification

#40

This phone verification shit is so awful. I have two friends who moved overseas and disconnected their cellphone plans without thinking about their MFA situation. Today I have to enforce MFA at the small company I'm working at, and just a month prior I held a cybersecurity seminar for them and explained that "phone MFA is… okay… but you should really use verification apps." But I didn't realize that you can't even en…

Yup. You have to enable it, add property MFA, then disable it.

Because Google knows best.

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