How likely is losing a Google account?
jefftk.com
How likely is losing a Google account?
1–10 of 305 posts
Re: How likely is losing a Google account?
#2Okay, so it's not very likely.
What made me transition away from Google/Gmail as my identity provider was pondering the question:
How screwed am I if I get locked out of my Google account?
The answer: Well, if you're on Hacker News, you may have a chance of reaching a human. But if you broke a policy, good luck.
I'm paying $5/mo. for that to not be that screwed.
(I have family who got locked out. It does happen.)
Re: How likely is losing a Google account?
#3This reminds me, again, that I should look into setting up my own home mail server. Is there an off the shelf solution for this? I don't mind setting up another PC as a server for this, but how hard is it?
Re: How likely is losing a Google account?
#4Okay, so it's not very likely. What made me transition away from Google/Gmail as my identity provider was pondering the question: How screwed am I if I get locked out of my Google account? The answer: Well, if you're on Hacker News, you may have a chance of reaching a human. But if you broke a policy, good luck. I'm paying $5/mo. for that to not be that screwed. (I have family who got locked out. It does happen.)
Hackernews made me realize manual recovery should never be a thing. My first account was taken over by a scammer even with a unique password. I suspect the admins of this site 'manually recovered' my account and gave it to them.
The last message of my first account, areallygoodname, is spam. I couldn't be bothered getting the admins to recover it back. I just took the lesson that hackernews is really insecure due to allowing manual recovery.
Re: How likely is losing a Google account?
#5Yup - happened to me. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2015/11/the-day-google-deleted-me/
"Luckily" I had enough identity documents to prove to Google's satisfaction that I was who I said I was. But even after I recovered the account, it was all screwed up.
Since then I've dropped my reliance on Google. I don't use them for sign-in, my mail gets regularly backed up, I use alternative apps where I can.
Google scale only works when people and processes are infallible.
Re: How likely is losing a Google account?
#6I had an account from 2005 with a bunch of email with my high-school friends. I then made another account using my real name, which became my primary. A year or two ago I wanted to reach out to one of those old friends, and knowing that I had their email address in the contacts of that old account, tried to log in. Nope, got stuck in an infinite loop of errors and impossible security challenges.
Ultimately I gave up and used another way of contacting that old friend. The experience also made me feel even better than I already did about having migrated to a domain I owned and a non-Google provider for my primary personal email.
I also don't use any 'identity services' because I have no basis of trust in any of them.
Re: How likely is losing a Google account?
#7This reminds me, again, that I should look into setting up my own home mail server. Is there an off the shelf solution for this? I don't mind setting up another PC as a server for this, but how hard is it?
If, perhaps, you decide against self-hosting, but still want a reasonably good solution, consider owning your domain but buying a hosted mail service. You own the MX records, so you can point it to a service and change it in the future if you need to (without fiddling with setting up a new mail host). Say you use XYZ mail provider, but they shut down for business. You can buy mail hosting from someone else within a day, and all the undelivered mail (if senders follow spec) will be delivered to the new service. And, in most cases, you can import your whole mailbox if you have it synced locally. I find this to be a good balance between privacy and not fiddling with anything at all. I thoroughly respect someone who selfhosts their mail but for me it's too crucial to worry about an update bringing it down - outsourcing it to an expert with proper fallbacks is more safe to me.
I personally use migadu, $19/yr (they have a student discount as well) for unlimited domains, 200 emails in/20 out daily/5GB storage. That's the lowest plan and I don't think I've ever surpassed it (the limits are soft anyhow). I get surprisingly less actual important email than I thought. (I use my gmail for rewards cards, etc)
But, to actually answer you, mailcow.email seems pretty good :)
Re: How likely is losing a Google account?
#8Okay, so it's not very likely. What made me transition away from Google/Gmail as my identity provider was pondering the question: How screwed am I if I get locked out of my Google account? The answer: Well, if you're on Hacker News, you may have a chance of reaching a human. But if you broke a policy, good luck. I'm paying $5/mo. for that to not be that screwed. (I have family who got locked out. It does happen.)
I'm not sure I understand.. where do you pay $5/mo for a service similar to Gmail? Or do you mean you have a paid Google account with extra storage?
Re: How likely is losing a Google account?
#9This reminds me, again, that I should look into setting up my own home mail server. Is there an off the shelf solution for this? I don't mind setting up another PC as a server for this, but how hard is it?
Impossible. Don't bother. Many threads on HN detailing the pain.
Re: How likely is losing a Google account?
#10This reminds me, again, that I should look into setting up my own home mail server. Is there an off the shelf solution for this? I don't mind setting up another PC as a server for this, but how hard is it?
It’s hard because the top 10 providers represent 90% of the traffic.
Best bet is to own your domain name, as you can control that out of band. If Google, Microsoft, Apple screw up, you can fail over.