Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which service do you recommend as alternative?
Fastmail. But you have to pay.
Paying is fine. Makes me the customer, not the product. Was just wondering which alternatives were worth considering :) thanks
Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data
51–60 of 124 posts
Re: Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data
#52Not intending to shame OP, but in 2024 with stories like this occurring regularly, I am totally baffled why anyone still trusts Google with anything important. Make the switch! Run, don’t walk. Do it today. Google is the Scorpion in the parable of the frog and the scorpion - it cannot help its nature. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog
This is not an example of malicious activity though.
Re: Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data
#53First things first: (Parenthesis) From now on, if it is important, pay for it. At least a smaller email provider with real human support, but best is "buying" your own domain and hosting your email. Same goes for backups. And pass the info to your loved ones. Less importantly: Since you know exactly what phone# is requested, try to contact it. Approach it in a way that doesn't alarm the renter and blocks you. Meanwhi…
> but best is "buying" your own domain and hosting your email I wish this were still the case. Sadly, if you buy a domain and host your own email, you're going to get stuck in spam filters all the damn time. Your email address will feel broken, sending messages into the void. The only email infrastructure services that are reasonably reliable belong to the likes of Google (Workspace), Microsoft (365), etc. Protonmail…
You can pay for an SMTP relay service that maintains a good reputation if sending mail is important to you. Also if the email is only for auth purposes to decouple 3rd party account recovery mechanism from services like cloud storage, sending email is not important, so an inbox without a healthy SMTP reputation can still be a valuable tool.
Re: Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data
#54Moving forward: always have an email client on a local machine downloading a copy of all emails. Have a local copy of all gdrive contents. Backup your password mangers to a txt file and encrypt it on a drive. And above all, dont trust google with all your stuff. They dont care.
I lost a gmail years ago and only use it as a throwaway email client now. You get what you pay for.
Re: Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data
#55Not intending to shame OP, but in 2024 with stories like this occurring regularly, I am totally baffled why anyone still trusts Google with anything important. Make the switch! Run, don’t walk. Do it today. Google is the Scorpion in the parable of the frog and the scorpion - it cannot help its nature. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog
This is not an example of malicious activity though.
But your parent comment said:
"Google is the Scorpion in the parable of the frog and the scorpion - it cannot help its nature."
The scorpion is not malicious in the scorpion and the frog fable. So what's your point?
Re: Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data
#56Not intending to shame OP, but in 2024 with stories like this occurring regularly, I am totally baffled why anyone still trusts Google with anything important. Make the switch! Run, don’t walk. Do it today. Google is the Scorpion in the parable of the frog and the scorpion - it cannot help its nature. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog
In this case a big part of the problem seems to be that OP has 2fa enabled but set to a phone number they don't have access to anymore. This is a really tricky situation for any provider to handle.
And they moved countries.
This is some of the most suspicious login activity imaginable. Nobody should be surprised if an account gets locked when you repeatedly try to access it from a new country and without your second factor.
Re: Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data
#57If you live in the EU, you can send a Subject Access Request to Google. That will get you back the contents of your account (emails, photos, etc). You can also try submitting a right to rectification. They hold data about you (your account) but have incorrect data regarding ownership. If either of those fails, you can escalate to the data protection authority in your jurisdiction. It is likely to take several weeks t…
I do live in the EU, if the plan to get access to the phone number with the telecom operators on monday doesn't pan out I will try to do that.
Honestly I don't mind waiting weeks to recover the contents of my account as long as I know that it's not lost forever. But all the FAQ and comments on the internet regarding similar scenarios have no good ending and people just giving up with no recourse.
I knew about Subject Access Request but didn't cross my mind I could use it in my current scenario. Thank you!
Re: Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't necessarily need to switch, just ensure Redundancy. If you keep a password database in there, or personal files, keep it on a secure external drive and make backups. Or Dropbox. Or anything. Just keep an extra. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. We have a home media server. Our important data automatically backs new files to a secure folder in there once a week. If I can do it, anyone can. And it could…
The issue is an @gmail.com address is owned by Google, not you. Not only do you lose your contacts’ ability to reach you, but accounts tend to use email as a last-resort primary identifier. If you lose your ability to receive verification codes, you’re often screwed. While the crowd here can maintain a domain, that’s not a realistic option for most average people. In practice, most people’s digital lives can be lost…
> While the crowd here can maintain a domain
And domains can be lost too. Missed payments, error in administrating the domain, government takedowns. Many failure modes exist for domains too. Nothing in the digital world is permanent! That's why I find it disturbing that so much of our digital identities are tied to our email addresses.
Re: Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
FastMail, Dropbox, Apple iCloud (Photos, Keychain, etc)
Would definitely not recommend ecosystems. They can and do lock you out and you have more to lose.
I’m able to get ahold of a human for support with all products I mentioned. I’m unable to get ahold of a human at Google ever for any of their consumer offerings. I see lots of HN threads begging for Google support, I see no HN threads begging for support from any of the companies I listed.
You should always have backups, regardless of provider.
Re: Tell HN: Need help, locked out of Google account with 10 years of personal data
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't necessarily need to switch, just ensure Redundancy. If you keep a password database in there, or personal files, keep it on a secure external drive and make backups. Or Dropbox. Or anything. Just keep an extra. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. We have a home media server. Our important data automatically backs new files to a secure folder in there once a week. If I can do it, anyone can. And it could…
How does that work in practice? I mean I may keep my data at multiple places. But my government, my hospitals, my utility accounts, they all want my email address to send me OTPs, password reset links and such things that are necessary to prove my digital identity. How do I spread this risk and make it manageable? I have to give them some email address and I fear losing access to my email. And yes, I can lose my emai…
Just looking at emails: your choices are to trust someone else's domain -- likely gmail -- or own your own domain + some kind of forwarding or 3rd party mail service.
For gmail, you risk account lockout like OP is experiencing. You can mitigate the risk with more recovery options at account.google.com like backup codes.
For a service other than gmail, I think the risks of lockout without customer service to help might possibly be less., especially if its paid like fastmail. If you do pay you have the risk of not wanting to pay anymore, or forgetting to pay, and if you don't pay you also have the risk of the service going away. I suppose the service going away is ok.
I for one am pretty confident google will keep gmail running as well as possible, so I see other services as a bit more risk there.
If you own the domain, you have paid for it and risk someone stealing it or grabbing it when you forget to pay. You can mitigate the risk by choosing a registrar with good security, paying for a longer term or not forgetting, eg a quarterly reminder to review your domain names. You also need to be able to access your registrar account. You can choose registrars you get other services from, like AWS Route 53 if you use amazon for anything, or Cloudflare for VPN, and mitigate the risk of non-payment or non-access because access and payment will be done more frequently.
Using your own domain is also more moving parts, decisions, setup, etc. So you risk more things going wrong or fatigue over all the maintenance taking over. How you weigh the monetary and complexity cost of using a domain name for email compared to the upside of control, having a personal site at your own name, etc.