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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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This saved me during my big scare about a year ago when I suddenly found myself locked out of an important account with no way to get back in (phone number was old and inaccessible). The password was fine, they just didn't believe it was me for some reason. A few months later it suddenly worked again, and I seized that opportunity to move permanently away from gmail. I was lucky. I do not want my access to my online…
How does paying 50 bucks a year give you that peace of mind? What kind of recovery procedures do providers like fastmail have?
The real protection is to get your own domain which Fastmail of course supports, so you can point it at a different email provider if worst comes to worst, like ajross's plausible proposition that:
"[...] I'd put the odds of Fastmail failing entirely as a business rather higher that those of any single user having an unresolvable 2FA glitch with a gmail account. In the world of real data and not anecdata, Big Tech is incredibly reliable."
Can someone explain how it’s anything but completely insane for an online service to deny access to someone with a *correct* password?? This isn’t someone getting locked out because they forgot their password (where I can at least understand why the user is at fault).
It helped me in the past.
Google gave away the Google Voice number I had since the GrandCentral days, a number obviously used daily with purchased credits in the account and religiously confirmed linked number. Zero customer support, no way to get the number returned and no refund on existing credits for toll services. And to add to the pain, they won’t give me a new GV number because it sees my linked number as a spam source and never sends…
Edit: MAKE YOUR NUMBER PERMANENT if you don't want to lose it due to 6 months inactivity. It's 20$. Also ported numbers are never recycled. I am happy with GV and will always use it.
If you're still using Google products as your primary drivers, then it's entirely your fault.
Do yourself a favour in 2023: drop Google and all the filthy excrement that they produce. There's plenty of much better alternatives, and from a purely market-based perspective Google deserves to rot in hell for all of its sins and shitty products.
Can someone explain how it’s anything but completely insane for an online service to deny access to someone with a *correct* password?? This isn’t someone getting locked out because they forgot their password (where I can at least understand why the user is at fault).
2FA exists because sometimes ne'er do wells get your password. Phishing, guessing weak passwords, password reuse from sites that are hacked, the list goes on.
Google gave away the Google Voice number I had since the GrandCentral days, a number obviously used daily with purchased credits in the account and religiously confirmed linked number. Zero customer support, no way to get the number returned and no refund on existing credits for toll services. And to add to the pain, they won’t give me a new GV number because it sees my linked number as a spam source and never sends…
My tentative plan is to get (another) cheap paygo SIM, stick it in a cell modem attached to a server, and set it up to forward all texts to email/xmpp/etc. Use that for all these longstanding snake oil auths.
Then move my main personal number (used to be a mobile number, now at GVoice) to a VOIP service. At which point if someone can't call/text my personal number because they're using some crappy service (eg Comcast mobile), then too bad, they can figure it out.
[0] I figure Twilio is in this same boat, although I don't have much experience with them?
Hope you get your account back. I’ve been on the fence about migrating off Gmail, but after reading threads like this, I put a contingency plan in place. Backups of my Google account are done hourly, and I have a custom domain/workspace account so I can move the domain elsewhere if needed.
How do you do hourly backups?
This is probably the #500 post on HN that reads "help I've been locked out of my Google account for Kafkaesque/inexplicable reasons and I have nobody to reach out to". If you're still using Google products as your primary drivers, then it's entirely your fault. Do yourself a favour in 2023: drop Google and all the filthy excrement that they produce. There's plenty of much better alternatives, and from a purely market…