161–170 of 189 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That argument assumes that Google email is crap. It isn't, it is the best email client I've used (online or off), and they have every right to be proud of it. Does it break sometimes? Sure. What doesn't? Does that make it a smelly pile of crap? I don't think it does, and I don't think most people would agree that it is. Gmail is a really awesome service that doesn't have the best support. Period. If people can't be b…
Well correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you have maintained that since it's a free service one should not expect reliable access or even a dime to be spent in dire circumstances outside your control; and you have further argued that Google is telling us the same thing in the terms (however inefficient the medium). If it is or were the case, that Gmail is not even supposed to be reliable, then might be very pretty a…
I do happen to think that Gmail is an exceptionally good mail service, though that is obviously just my opinion. I think statistics would agree that it is a fairly reliable service. Reliable enough that it doesn't need to be disclaimed as "We're just messing around here really" on the home page. Nor am I willing to necessarily concede that it is 'bad for most people'.
In a nutshell, I would say that it's a great service if you can agree with its terms. This isn't mail that people are generally paying tons of money for, and I think their expectations are out of sync with reality. The general argument I hear is "BUT MY LIFE IS IN THAT EMAIL". If that's the case, gmail wasn't probably the email service you were supposed to be using, at least not for free, in the same way I don't store my valuables under the rock in the garden. If it mattered that much, you shouldn't have entrusted it to a service that didn't have a support policy more in line with your expectations.
I have gmail, and I'll concede that it would be inconvenient if they turned off my access tomorrow, but I keep all my more pressing correspondence to services that I have a good-faith belief will give a shit if I lose my information. If google apps were shutting people off, I would expect people to be upset, and I would not consider that ire as meritless.
My only real complaint with the post you've just made is the assertion that Google doesn't care to provide any service whatsoever. If they didn't care about providing reliable service, then it probably wouldn't be so reliable. I personally have experienced maybe two or three outages since I joined the Beta however many years ago. Those were global outages, or at least wide-spread. That sort of thing generally doesn't happen any more. In addition, it's not as though swarms of people are having their accounts disconnected every day. We keep bandying about the 99% number, but I really suspect that it's probably more like 99.99%, but that .01% is enough people that we still hear about it.
Some of this is opinion, and some of my argument is diminished by Google's people support in general, but I think it's getting short shrift because of these rare occasions, and I think that it's considered on the same scale as when Paypal freezes someone's account, which I think is unfair.
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To setup 2 factor auth, you have to give them a phone number that you can receive a call or sms on, I believe.
I'm pretty sure that's just for recovery. The actual setup involves scanning a QR code in the Authenticator app, which is the seed for the TOTP - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_One-time_Password_Al...
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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…
Well, you have to win points (and got one from me) for coming up with the best analogy. 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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Well, you have to win points (and got one from me) for coming up with the best analogy. 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'.
Phone support? Where? I have looked for phone support when all the email disappeared from my gmail inbox. There is no phone support for Gmail.
Found in my 'Help' link from GMail.
[redacted], it looks like this issue resolved itself; I'm curious, did you mention your email address anywhere on this page? I didn't see it mentioned. 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.
The root of the issue for the consumer of Google services is not a loss of email access (that's just the sort of technical problem everyone has when dealing with the internet). The issue is that there is no person representing Google who says, "I'm sorry you are experiencing difficulty, let me see what I can do to help you."
Google doesn't even go there on their own support forums: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/gmail/%22Ac...
There is a meaningful number of posts for the exact issue the OP experienced and what little assistance that Googlers provide is generally of the "you did something wrong" variety rather than "we're working on making it better."
You're wise to have a backup plan.
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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…
And this time I'd like the outcome of this thread not to be just "A Google insider wandered past and fixed this guys problem" but "Here's how we're going to make sure it doesn't happen again. Because next time it might be me and by then Hacker News might have grown weary of these kind of posts and I won't be able to get the necessary attention. Nothing. I repeat - nothing - is pushing me to move away from dependence…
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…
No!
Why or why not?
Because I'm still left without a service that I may be using for something important. Maybe I've got a deadline coming up and I need to access my emails, who knows.
The problem, IMHO, is not that the account was locked. I'm perfectly cool with that, if thats what it takes to rectify whatever the problem was. The problem is that there is no way to contact Google about it. So lets say it was important to me to access my emails for whatever reason and I find my account locked because it was compromised. I now have no way of fixing this. No way of getting at my data. No way of even knowing why it was locked. If I could call Google up on the phone and they told me "oh, your account was compromised" at least I'd know whats going on. They then could work with me to at least provide me with access to my data while I wait for them to fix the problem and get my account restored. Or they can tell me to change my passwords or whatever it is I should be doing.
Right now all you get is "we locked your account, good luck, mwuahahaha".