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

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

#161

Post by zxcvbn4038 »

blacklight wrote: post #96

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…

That is pretty harsh. The only way to resolve problems with Google like this is to know someone on the inside that can help, or to generate enough outrage on social media that some service team someplace takes notice and reaches out to help the guy.

What the poster can do in the future is enable 2FA on his Google accounts as that seems to streamline password recovery. At minimum add a phone and backup codes. Even better add a couple yubikeys (and maybe drop the phone after adding yubikeys because phones are super easy to compromise)

Same goes for GitHub.

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

#162

Post by kilroy123 »

joe__f wrote: post #126
blacklight wrote: post #96

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…

I've been thinking to move away from Gmail for a while now, what alternatives do you suggest?

fastmail with custom domain

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

#163

Post by nzealand »

harshalizee wrote: post #123
blacklight wrote: post #96

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…

But realistically how do you do it? I've stopped signing up for any new Google products for well over half a decade now. Even moved my email to protonmail. I have a little over 500 accounts tied to my Gmail over the last two decades. Moving them is a pain but still possible. The problem arises when it comes to existing accounts with byzantine financial institutions. Trying to change email addresses that are linked to…

Financial institutions are the most frustrating when it comes to email notifications to custom domains. Often times the confirmation email comes through fine, then the email notifications fail to be sent. Luckily with all financial institutions it's easy (probably too easy) to call them up and change your email address.

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

#165

Post by prlambert »

The anti-Google frothing here has gotten so extreme it's crossed into comedy. Maybe instead of assuming incompetence and malevolence you should consider how hard it is to do this perfectly.

You don't have to like them, but the fact is the there are many many smart and competent people working on these systems trying to do the best for all users of Gmail and Google Accounts. Every day there are hundreds of very bad people around the world trying to gain access to Gmail accounts to do very bad things using that access. All the worst parts of humanity have found their way to leverage it. Balancing security and user-friendliness is one of the hardest problems in tech and it's impossible to do perfectly.

It seems from this thread that the OP did regain access and it didn't take that long.

Edit: I worked at Google for a few years, including on Gmail, and know that the people there really do care about all these things. But I left in the summer, no longer their employee.

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

#166

Post by prlambert »

blacklight wrote: post #96

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…

"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Edit out swipes." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#167

Post by usr1106 »

jeffbee wrote: post #140
schiffern wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying this now. Edit: the closest solution is to try account recovery, which is what I was doing. :( I don't want to "spam" the recovery form, since I suspect that will only make it worse. Edit2: trying Gmail app and Google Authenticator now, to see if that makes a difference. Will update with progress. Edit3: no dice. Gmail app just loops me to a message saying "Google couldn't verify that this account belongs to y…

Are you or can you try to make sure that your behavior is s close to normal as possible? If you normally access your account from Chrome, use Chrome. If you normally use macOS use it. If you normally have a static address at home, use it. Trying to recover your account from your friend’s house in another country, or whatever, could be making it worse.

My IPv4 address at home has not changed for over 10 years. My IPv6 address at work has not changed for 4 years (modulo privacy entension). I have not used any public hotspot for at least 5 years. Still Google greets me several times a month welcome on your new Linux computer. Yes, I use Cookie Auto Delete. But if they had had reasonable algorithms, they would long have learned that I never have their surveillance history when logging in.

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

#168

Post by nzealand »

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #161
blacklight wrote: post #96

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…

That is pretty harsh. The only way to resolve problems with Google like this is to know someone on the inside that can help, or to generate enough outrage on social media that some service team someplace takes notice and reaches out to help the guy. What the poster can do in the future is enable 2FA on his Google accounts as that seems to streamline password recovery. At minimum add a phone and backup codes. Even bet…

The poster can also be patient. I've been locked out of infrequently used google accounts before. Eventually the account will be unlocked. If you ignore it for a few days (also pretty harsh.)

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

#169

Post by beardbound »

sph wrote: post #139
joe__f wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking to move away from Gmail for a while now, what alternatives do you suggest?

Fastmail with your custom domain. I am a user, I am not paid to advertise them. I do not miss Google at all. If you do not like Fastmail, still get your own domain for emails.

I moved to fast mail a couple of years ago and got my mom to move to and I’ve been a happy customer the whole time it’s great. I moved when I started getting concerned about how reliant I was on google. Now my core services are spread across several different companies. I also am not affiliated in any way.

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

#170

Post by jnky »

I had a similar problem a while back where Google demanded a second authentication factor for an account that didn't have 2FA set. It asked for a previous password that the account must have had >10 years ago and I think the answer to a security question that I couldn't answer, because I always use cryptic responses to those and apparently didn't save this one way back when. My rationale was that I wouldn't need any of that, because I knew the account password so there would never be a need to go through account recovery.

Either way, I found a solution to that on one of those Google user support forums: I had to not try and log in to the account for approximately 40 days. After that, it'd let me log in with just the password again. This is apparently because Google keeps flagging the account of getting attacked and requiring a second authentication factor for some reason and the timer for that keeps getting reset after a failed challenge for one of the account recovery factors. After something between 30 and 40 days, I could log in to the account with just the password again.

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