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How likely is losing a Google account?

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Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#171

Post by blfr »

quietbritishjim wrote: post #62
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…

> OneNote search unhelpfully defaults to searching the current pagwe If this trivial complaint is the worst you can think of for OneNote then that shows what a good job they've done. I actually hate how good OneNote is because it doesn't work on Linux (as a native application) and there's no good alternative that does. The usual answer I hear is to use a wiki but one of OneNote's killer features is how good its offli…

My list of m365 complaints is virtually endless. It's nothing major but rather death by 1000 cuts.

The focus is almost never where I expect it, the notes overlap each other by defualt, the sync takes enough time to notice every time you make notes on your laptop before a meeting and then try to use them off the phone.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#173

Post by garciansmith »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #159
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…

I can't find any information on what happens if you stop paying for a Fastmail account. 1Password for example freezes your account in read-only mode. It's documented that Fastmail will re-use addresses for free trials and when a user requests to cancel [1]. It isn't clear what would happen if for some reason your card expired, they stopped accepting it [2], or your bank messed up and blocked the transaction [3]. To m…

I had an issue with the credit card used to renew a Fastmail account. Fastmail sent me emails about the issue, but it took a couple days to fix everything on my end. Even after the renew date passed my email functioned as normal, so there seems to be, at least, a grace period. Not sure what would have happened if it went on for longer though.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#174

Post by creata »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #53
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…

I would tell you that after using Fastmail, Gmail seems positively glacial and slow. Like, it's borderline "why would anyone put up with this, except maybe because they haven't used good email before". And we just got a huge fine for missing a bill here because a family Gmail account spam-binned it, which isn't an issue for my Fastmail, which handles spam better.

> which isn't an issue for my Fastmail, which handles spam better.

That's interesting, can you expand on this?

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#175

Post by NelsonMinar »

ryandrake wrote: post #153
dspillett wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My takeaway was that if I was ever in a dispute over a couple of hundred bucks for Google, I would not risk a chargeback for fear of retaliation. My takeaway from that is to never spend more than a few quid (i.e. money I'd care about losing) on anything linked that directly to Google.

To me, a chargeback is a 'burn the bridges' moment. If a company has wronged me to the point I'm prepared to do a chargeback, then I obviously don't want anything to do with that company anymore, and I welcome them to close my account since I will never do business with them again. Why would you want to continue doing business with a company that has frustrated you to the point of doing a chargeback?

I hear you, but Google is a giant dominant player. Just because their third party cell phone hardware service contractor loses a phone doesn't mean someone doesn't still need to use them for email or cloud computing services.

It's the lack of a central, accountable point of contact for everything under the "Google Account" that's the real problem. Since its very beginning Google has been bad at consumer relationships.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#176

Post by NelsonMinar »

kioleanu wrote: post #135
NelsonMinar wrote: post #24

Chargebacks can get your Google account locked. If you have a dispute with Google and protect yourself by reversing a credit card charge, Google might lock you entirely out of your account. The Google Pixel subreddit has a bunch of people's stories about that: https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/search/?q=chargeback Not sure if this counts as "policy reason" for the article's purposes; he sort of dismisses payment d…

It also really needs to be mentioned that Google’s store was (is) absolutely awful for buying gear. I wanted to buy 2 pixels from them. Put the order in, no news for 7 days, at the exact 7 day mark my order gets cancelled. Tried talking to customer support with no success because there isn’t any. So I put the order in the second time and the exact same thing happens: after exactly 7 days, my order gets cancelled. I s…

They're so bad at it I wonder why they try. They clearly don't want to do it well.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#177

Post by coffeeblack »

balboah wrote: post #99
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

I am using Protonmail for some years now. I have maybe one spam mail per week in my inbox, everything else is filtered correctly.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#178

Post by kyrra »

kioleanu wrote: post #135
NelsonMinar wrote: post #24

Chargebacks can get your Google account locked. If you have a dispute with Google and protect yourself by reversing a credit card charge, Google might lock you entirely out of your account. The Google Pixel subreddit has a bunch of people's stories about that: https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/search/?q=chargeback Not sure if this counts as "policy reason" for the article's purposes; he sort of dismisses payment d…

It also really needs to be mentioned that Google’s store was (is) absolutely awful for buying gear. I wanted to buy 2 pixels from them. Put the order in, no news for 7 days, at the exact 7 day mark my order gets cancelled. Tried talking to customer support with no success because there isn’t any. So I put the order in the second time and the exact same thing happens: after exactly 7 days, my order gets cancelled. I s…

Googler, opinions are my own. I work on payments, and have dealt with our credit card processing a bunch.

As far as I know, we've never lost control of credit card numbers and had them leaked. We actually work very hard to make sure humans can never see card numbers (our internal controls are more strict than most banks and card networks).

Also, I didn't think we would hold an auth on a card for 30 days (normally it's less than that). For the MCCs we charge payments on, I believe Visa and the others will only hold an auth for 7 days[0]. If the Auth is staying on your card for longer than that, it's likely your bank is holding the funds, not Google. We try to always cancel auth holds before they expire, to make sure we don't have lingering auths like you saw (I've tweaked this previously due to complaints like yours).

I can maybe look into the payments on your account if you'd like (my work email is in my profile), but I wouldn't be able to reply. It would just give us data if we are failing to cancel auths in some cases.

[0] https://www.chargebackgurus.com/blog/credit-card-authorizati...

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#179

Post by oaiey »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #24

Chargebacks can get your Google account locked. If you have a dispute with Google and protect yourself by reversing a credit card charge, Google might lock you entirely out of your account. The Google Pixel subreddit has a bunch of people's stories about that: https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/search/?q=chargeback Not sure if this counts as "policy reason" for the article's purposes; he sort of dismisses payment d…

That is very close to if not monopolistic behavior.

Re: How likely is losing a Google account?

#180

Post by drivebycomment »

jeffbee wrote: post #51
theptip wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An extremely underrated (and insightful) point to consider. More generally, how do you actually get a measure of risk between two providers, when the absolute frequencies of measurable events are very low? It seems plausible to me that FastMail could have 10x or 100x the level of security incidents as GMail, and it would still net out to an undetectable difference in the number of public complaints. If we had interna…

When I worked in the anti-abuse business, account security was tracked by lurking in organized crime fora and determining the market price for stolen accounts. I don't know what it looks like for FastMail, but I do recall that the range between good and bad platforms was huge. A stolen Google account was like $10, but stolen Yahoo! Mail accounts were more like a nickel per thousand.

You can search for "bulk account purchase" and there are various "sellers" where you can compare the price quickly.
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