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How likely is losing a Google account?

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Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#91

Post by alt227 »

bornfreddy wrote: post #72
blfr wrote: post #40

Google is too good not to roll the dice. I use Gmail in my own domain with a different registrar. Push comes to shove, I'll move, restore backups, and carry on. But damn are non-Google ecosystems bad. At work we use m365 and everything is atrocious compared to Google. Loggin in is a mess, email search is dreadful, OneNote search unhelpfully defaults to searching the current pagwe, integration with Android is weak, Ou…

Well yeah, don't compare them to Microsoft... MS Teams suck, all 365 is a mess. Actually, don't compare to ecosystems at all. Specialized service providers are much much better.

I have been pleasantly surprised at the management tools provided by Microsoft to manage 365/Azure/Exchange accounts. Everything seems intuitive and easy.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#92

Post by ineptech »

dylan604 wrote: post #35
guptaneil wrote: post #13

It's true that every service has to deal with the same policy and lockout problems, but that doesn't lead to the conclusion that the risk is the same. I pay for FastMail because 1. if something goes wrong, I can reach a human without needing to write a viral blog post first. Other services pay for a customer service department. 2. I trust FastMail more to not shut down their product because they got bored. Sure Gmail…

2) Why in the world would Gmail get shut down? The veins of treasure to be mined from within the user's emails are vast and endless. It is quite simply a mother lode. The only bigger source within their direct control is the search input screen.

I agree, but I do worry about it being ruined some other way - forcing me to use Chrome, censoring emails, bundling it with a paid service, ad-blocker-blocker, something else...

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#93

Post by jsnell »

jmull wrote: post #80
blfr wrote: post #40

Google is too good not to roll the dice. I use Gmail in my own domain with a different registrar. Push comes to shove, I'll move, restore backups, and carry on. But damn are non-Google ecosystems bad. At work we use m365 and everything is atrocious compared to Google. Loggin in is a mess, email search is dreadful, OneNote search unhelpfully defaults to searching the current pagwe, integration with Android is weak, Ou…

Eh. I had Google hosting my family's email for a long time (I had one of those grandfathered free custom domain setups). It wasn't bad and it was free (!), but: - Google threatened to cut me off. - Wife's account needed attention to keep it under the disk space quotas. - Google had creepy marketing based on private email content (making you worry about what else they are doing with my private email content). - It was…

> Google had creepy marketing based on private email content (making you worry about what else they are doing with my private email content

As far as I know, email content was never used for ad targeting on any iteration of Workspace/Gsuite/Google Apps for Your Domain/etc. (And it hasn't been used for consumer gmail for many years either.)

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#94

Post by bookofjoe »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #15

Two comments on this. 1. Merely looking at published noise may vastly underestimate the size of the problem. Lots of "normal" people including one close to me have several accounts containing parts of their life history lost for one reason or another, and just accepted it and moved on. 2. "Kids in the bath", ha. Carefully framed photo to avoid sensitive areas, taken with a tablet that happened to be handy that is not…

> Merely looking at published noise may vastly underestimate the size of the problem.

Exactly so. My rule of thumb is that for every problem/complaint you hear about, there are [at least] 100x that many whose unhappy campers won't/can't bother to do anything about it.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#95

Post by mattnewton »

jxf wrote: post #70
mattnewton wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they are talking about some change to workspace effectively breaking the service for them. This has some precedent (with the old “dasher” personal accounts having growing pains for some people migrating IIRC) but also seems like a very low risk.

What are the "dasher personal accounts"? I haven't heard of that before and search results seem to think I'm asking about DoorDash.

That was the internal name for personal paid gmail - I honestly cannot remember the nondescript word combination they called it publicly, but it was rolled into Gsuite which is now google workspace and google decided they wanted to focus on business users instead.

I think this is a relevant article: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/01/google-relents-legac...

Anyways, basically agree that gmail isn’t going anywhere, just a gmail-related story of people depending on a new flavor of gmail/ google identity that was being migrated messily.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#96

Post by celdon25 »

nirvdrum wrote: post #68
jeffbee wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I can reach a human" is a huge security vuln. I don't want people social engineering my identity provider.

I'll take the limited risk. I've had to contact Fastmail support and it was a breath of fresh air. It's a bit absurd that something so fundamental as email has essentially no support from a company as large as Google; it's not a bug-free product. I suppose eliminating humans is a security win, but HN is full of stories of AI systems failing and banning accounts for essentially nothing. Not having a human to appeal to…

My main email account was through Hotmail in 2000, and it got shut down that year due to a social engineering attack. The guy who did it even told me he was going to do it first. I didn’t get to have it covered in any mainstream news headlines either :P

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#99

Post by balboah »

guptaneil wrote: post #13

It's true that every service has to deal with the same policy and lockout problems, but that doesn't lead to the conclusion that the risk is the same. I pay for FastMail because 1. if something goes wrong, I can reach a human without needing to write a viral blog post first. Other services pay for a customer service department. 2. I trust FastMail more to not shut down their product because they got bored. Sure Gmail…

Used fastmail (and proton) for a year or two. Had to go back to google because there’s just too much spam otherwise

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#100

Post by kmlx »

dylan604 wrote: post #35
guptaneil wrote: post #13

It's true that every service has to deal with the same policy and lockout problems, but that doesn't lead to the conclusion that the risk is the same. I pay for FastMail because 1. if something goes wrong, I can reach a human without needing to write a viral blog post first. Other services pay for a customer service department. 2. I trust FastMail more to not shut down their product because they got bored. Sure Gmail…

2) Why in the world would Gmail get shut down? The veins of treasure to be mined from within the user's emails are vast and endless. It is quite simply a mother lode. The only bigger source within their direct control is the search input screen.

> The veins of treasure to be mined from within the user's emails are vast and endless.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en-GB

> We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads.

the veins dried up back in 2017.

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