131–140 of 189 posts
I'm happy to ask people for more details. Normally when you have two-factor authentication on, I wouldn't expect you to see this message. So there might be some improvements we need to make on our side to try to prevent this from happening for other people.
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I'd love to do this, but my Apps account gives me no such opportunity to setup 2FA, following those instructions: http://cl.ly/242v451j3g331U393u34
Apps account administrator should enable 2FA for the domain. I have this option in all of my Apps administrator panel.
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> if you want support, you pay for it. That's no excuse to provide a shitty service. For 99% of people GMail is not shitty and is infact quite awesome. That doesn't change the fact that with the amount of people Google has, not having even a queue for people to get minor issues fixed (Freaking MICROSOFT can get this right, for crying out loud!!) is ridiculous.
I disagree. The amount of people they'd have to hire to support that 1% of their users could make the service untenable as free to the rest of us. In my opinion, the thing done wrong was offering support through unofficial channels. It sets the wrong expectations and perpetuates the notion that if you know the right people, you'll get the support that others can't, and honestly don't deserve. If I give rakes out to 1…
I agree that the gmail economic model might not be feasible if support costs were included. But I don't know that numbers so my agreement is not important.
If 99% of users have no problem with google's services currently then, X% have no problem with google's services in the future. I'm not sure how to solve for X.
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I disagree. The amount of people they'd have to hire to support that 1% of their users could make the service untenable as free to the rest of us. In my opinion, the thing done wrong was offering support through unofficial channels. It sets the wrong expectations and perpetuates the notion that if you know the right people, you'll get the support that others can't, and honestly don't deserve. If I give rakes out to 1…
Comparing email, adsense, etc. to rakes is flawed. (Please, don't persuade me otherwise.) I agree that the gmail economic model might not be feasible if support costs were included. But I don't know that numbers so my agreement is not important. If 99% of users have no problem with google's services currently then, X% have no problem with google's services in the future. I'm not sure how to solve for X.
Also, as I recently discovered, Google does have a for-pay phone support service for Gmail users, as well as all the other forms of support they offer in the form of message board, how tos, google groups, etc.
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I do pay for GMail storage, so the predictable parade of "WHAT DID YOU EXPECT FOR FREE?????" (answer: exactly what was advertised, a working email service) is tiresome -- and besides that, there isn't even a contact form for this issue. There is no way to communicate with anyone or to even raise an alert of "hey, I have a problem". The only way that it is going to get fixed is for someone to manually intervene, and t…
> exactly what was advertised, a working email service Claiming Gmail (even the free one) doesn't work when, in fact, it experiences seemingly random and very infrequent outages, is disingenuous. It's incredibly hard to make a complex application like Gmail work perfectly all the time for all its users and I'm completely sure they are well within their ToS. Much like we are willing to live with software that has some…
This is a general problem with Google and their customer-no-service attitude. It's just deplorable. It really is. You have to wonder: What is it going to take for them to give a shit and actually do something about it? Very soon the word gets out that HN is where you can get your Google bullshit problems fixed and we'll be treated to pages-upon-pages of people with Google problems. The general issue is that of accoun…
Giving away an awesome mail service for free to the world is not evil. Being too busy to support every Tom, Dick and Harry that has problems with it is also not evil. An analogy: "Hey Tom, I'm not using this rake any more. Would you like to have it? I'll give it to you." "Sure Dick. Thanks, this is a very nice rake indeed." The rake breaks. "Hey Dick. The rake doesn't work any more. Come over here and fix it." "Sorry…
[Dick comes to the door of Tom.]
Dick: Hey Tom, I see that you don't have a mailbox. I have a few hundred extras down the street, would you like to use one on the condition that I might analyze who is sending you mail and the like? It's really secure and it's all the rage in the city you can store 2000 pounds of mail forever blah blah blah. You should really use it!
Tom: Sure Dick, it's a real help to have an address for bills, personal correspondence, etc. And I can use it to establish residency and so on.
[Tom puts the address in his letterhead, tells everyone to use it, makes several job applications with it, etc. He uses it for everything. Every service he uses authenticates him by his access to this box.]
[One morning Tom goes out to his box and sees it has been padlocked. After a great deal of searching, Tom finds an unofficial contact for Dick.]
Tom: Hey Dick, can you unlock the box for me? I am expecting a check, a letter from my daughter, etc.
Dick: Sorry, I can't do that. And I can't tell you why. What did you expect for free? Anyway, how did you get this number?
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Giving away an awesome mail service for free to the world is not evil. Being too busy to support every Tom, Dick and Harry that has problems with it is also not evil. An analogy: "Hey Tom, I'm not using this rake any more. Would you like to have it? I'll give it to you." "Sure Dick. Thanks, this is a very nice rake indeed." The rake breaks. "Hey Dick. The rake doesn't work any more. Come over here and fix it." "Sorry…
Gmail is not a used rake. [Dick comes to the door of Tom.] Dick: Hey Tom, I see that you don't have a mailbox. I have a few hundred extras down the street, would you like to use one on the condition that I might analyze who is sending you mail and the like? It's really secure and it's all the rage in the city you can store 2000 pounds of mail forever blah blah blah. You should really use it! Tom: Sure Dick, it's a re…
Though as I recently discovered, they do have phone support, and message boards, and google groups, and all that jazz.
I understand that I'm perhaps the outlier in thinking this, but Google is acting exactly as they said they would, and exactly as they always have. I don't see malice in that, and I certainly don't see 'evil'.
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> if you want support, you pay for it. That's no excuse to provide a shitty service. For 99% of people GMail is not shitty and is infact quite awesome. That doesn't change the fact that with the amount of people Google has, not having even a queue for people to get minor issues fixed (Freaking MICROSOFT can get this right, for crying out loud!!) is ridiculous.
I disagree. The amount of people they'd have to hire to support that 1% of their users could make the service untenable as free to the rest of us. In my opinion, the thing done wrong was offering support through unofficial channels. It sets the wrong expectations and perpetuates the notion that if you know the right people, you'll get the support that others can't, and honestly don't deserve. If I give rakes out to 1…
"EASY COME, EASY GO
Gmail is a quick and dirty email service for people who don't really need reliable access. Please do not bother signing up unless it does not matter whether you lose the address and all your email."
I think that would begin to resolve the problem being highlighted here for sure.
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Your rake analogy is not sound. Ok so Google gives Gmail for free - as in you don't need to pay for it. But is it really "free"? No. They parse your emails so they know what you are buying/selling, who you are talking to, what sites you have a membership on, etc. They also use Gmail to display ads (based off of the things they learned from your emails) to make money off of you. They probably do other things i'm not e…
Since that shoe had to drop, you could also point out that they DO provide support. There are google groups, message boards, support forums, HowTos. There's even Prioritized phone support that you can apparently sign up for.[1] It's not as though they hand you the source code and a note saying "Good luck." [1] - http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a...
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So, just for the sake of argument, let's assume that the poster's account was compromised and being used to send spam. Would that change your analysis? Why or why not? My suspicion is that your immediate response will be to change the subject, most likely along the lines of "The problem isn't the temporary freeze on the account, it's the lack of communication." So I'd like to preemptively point out that you didn't ma…
I can only speak for myself here, but let me state unequivocally that the lack of communication and path for recourse is the problem. PR-wise it might be a tough sell, but I think a perfectly acceptable answer is a pay-per-incident support line that connects to someone who can actually fix my problem.
Of course, they would have to provide support to the support providers, but that would be a much smaller, more knowledgeable population.