Ask HN: Help – Locked out of 10 years Gmail account

Due to the recent LastPass debacle, I decided to cycle my Gmail passwords. Boy that was a mistake!!

Gmail has decided that I can't log in with "just" my password. The new password is correct. It then asks me for my old password, which I put in correctly. Then it tells me I can't log in anyway. :(

Occasionally it will give me a QR code to scan. But I can't scan it on my phone, since my phone is logged out.

I can't log in to my recovery account, because (like a fool) I changed the passwords simultaneously. Now both are locked.

Somebody help! My account name is [redacted]@gmail.com (the recovery email should match my HN username). I'm locked out of a decade+ of correspondence, recovery, and historical data.

Did you follow the steps at https://support.google.com/accounts/troubleshooter/2402620 ?

Yikes! good luck, hope it works out. This is scary. Gmail is still, by far, the best email app. Something like this could happen to me and, I suspect, a lot of other people.

I've been locked out of 17 year old gmail account for awhile now because I refuse to sync my phone to it. I only want to login to delete the contents and deactivate the account. It still forwards to my Thunderbird which is how I noticed Google stops dedicating spam protection to un-synced accounts (or something). So, they want me to go away, and I want to go away, but they won't let me go away.

My strategy is to only use GMail and no other Google service at all (cloud, ads, ...)

This way there is little possibility of somehow being labeled as fraudulent.