Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tell HN: Lost then regained access to Google account, with correct credentials

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 151 posts

Re: Tell HN: Lost then regained access to Google account, with correct credentials

#91

Post by junon »

ttybird wrote: post #86

I hate this. If I know the password I should be able to log in to my account no matter what (unless if I have 2fa enabled). Sadly companies like Google and MS do not like this idea, they also often use the excuse that they can't verify you in order to mine your phone number. "Edit: Account recovered. I used chromium to login (which I never do) and then back to Firefox" How can google keep getting away with this? MS g…

Google denying me access to YouTube videos asking me to verify my age by giving them either my passport or my credit card should be illegal as well.

Then they expanded it to the app store - some apps, even ones that don't seem to need to be age restricted - now require I verify my age in the same way. I just give them the middle finger and manually install the APKs for those apps.

Unfortunately, no way to get around the YouTube restriction though.

Google having a complete monopoly on this stuff has got to end at some point. They have way too much power over what are now pretty mainstream services to the internet, especially since they cannot be completed with by most companies, even those with adequate funding and reach.

Re: Tell HN: Lost then regained access to Google account, with correct credentials

#92

Post by jonathanstrange »

dt3ft wrote: post #50

This story keeps coming up. When you pay for email, you get a customer status. This entails a SLA and a bunch of other rights, which you most likely never get from a free service provider. I hope if those reading these comments still use free email service instead of hosting their own (or paying for it), strongly consider making the switch.

A good idea is to never use a large corporation for important things like email, because these are built on maximum scalability and therefore practically always have lousy customer support (automated replies & chat, etc.). I'm paying for the same small email provider I used more than 20 years ago and it has always been worth every penny. If an issue comes up, I'll call their customer support or write an email and they fix it within minutes.

Re: Tell HN: Lost then regained access to Google account, with correct credentials

#93

Post by dmd »

eliben wrote: post #87
dt3ft wrote: post #50

This story keeps coming up. When you pay for email, you get a customer status. This entails a SLA and a bunch of other rights, which you most likely never get from a free service provider. I hope if those reading these comments still use free email service instead of hosting their own (or paying for it), strongly consider making the switch.

You can pay for gmail too, and get phone/chat/email support via https://one.google.com/about/plans (basic plan is less than $2/month) Doesn't this work for folks?

Not if you can't log in!

Re: Tell HN: Lost then regained access to Google account, with correct credentials

#94

Post by jacquesm »

daitangio wrote: post #65
dt3ft wrote: post #50

This story keeps coming up. When you pay for email, you get a customer status. This entails a SLA and a bunch of other rights, which you most likely never get from a free service provider. I hope if those reading these comments still use free email service instead of hosting their own (or paying for it), strongly consider making the switch.

I switched to my hosted email, it is not so difficult to manage, and I feel very free. Also I have created accounts for my children, my wife with very little costs. The magic? This very well supported project: https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver

Typically solutions like that will work for a few months or years and then you are in much bigger trouble than before. Highly annoying. This is because just like every other server you will need to keep it up to date, you are going to have to deal with being falsely labelled as a spammer, you will have people attempting to abuse your server and so on. I'm still doing this but the overhead is such that I'm tempted to just let it go and move to Fastmail or something similar.

Re: Tell HN: Lost then regained access to Google account, with correct credentials

#95

Post by hbn »

donmcronald wrote: post #61
mihamaker wrote: post #23

I lost a lot of accounts because of this misunderstanding. I always use a VPN for work. I keep all logins and passwords in the password manager. But Google is very worried about my safety, even to my detriment.

Using a public VPN is almost guaranteed to flag your logins as suspicious at all of the big tech companies. If anyone wants to see how intent big tech is on tying your profiles back to personally identifiable information, connect to a VPN and try to create new accounts on various services. It's basically impossible without a non-VOIP phone number. If you manage to get an email address, big sites like Facebook and Twi…

Whenever I'm connected to my VPN (I use Private Internet Access), Google will force me to pass a captcha test every time I do a search

Re: Tell HN: Lost then regained access to Google account, with correct credentials

#96

Post by dahfizz »

probably_wrong wrote: post #82
dahfizz wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, you'll probably have to jump some hoops to prove that you are you, but IMHO that's a reasonable compromise. But how can I prove I own my email if I don't have the credentials / Google won't let me log in?

I wrote about my experience for that exact same situation here: https://7c0h.com/blog/new/lost_gmail_ii.html In short, you can send their Data Protection Office a letter demanding access to your data. In my case it took almost three months but they eventually relented and reset my password. I guess a lawyer could have gotten it done faster, but who knows.

Did they ever verify the you had the old password / recovery email like you offered? It seems strange to me that they reset an account password because they got many letters asking them to.

Re: Tell HN: Lost then regained access to Google account, with correct credentials

#97

Post by 35fbe7d3d5b9 »

eliben wrote: post #87
dt3ft wrote: post #50

This story keeps coming up. When you pay for email, you get a customer status. This entails a SLA and a bunch of other rights, which you most likely never get from a free service provider. I hope if those reading these comments still use free email service instead of hosting their own (or paying for it), strongly consider making the switch.

You can pay for gmail too, and get phone/chat/email support via https://one.google.com/about/plans (basic plan is less than $2/month) Doesn't this work for folks?

Backups are worthless unless you try to recover; support is worthless unless you put a ticket in and see what you get.

Before I migrated my domain and old emails to Fastmail I contacted their support twice to see what I got. Once I simulated an account lockout, the second was more of a technical problem. I can't remember the exact steps that I needed to take, but I do remember that their support was quick to react, had surprising technical depth, and fixed my "problems" faster than expected. I had no problem trusting them with my data.

Has anyone actually tested Google One's support?

Re: Tell HN: Lost then regained access to Google account, with correct credentials

#98

Post by chrisan »

siddharthgoel88 wrote: post #77
dt3ft wrote: post #50

This story keeps coming up. When you pay for email, you get a customer status. This entails a SLA and a bunch of other rights, which you most likely never get from a free service provider. I hope if those reading these comments still use free email service instead of hosting their own (or paying for it), strongly consider making the switch.

I feel signing up for a new paid/self-hosted email becomes tricky when a person has used an email for most of his life. All the online-services, grad school, office-alum, etc. use the old email. And now when you switch to a new one then it becomes hard I feel. Any suggestions?

Email forwarding. For anyone you communicated with in the last year (or x months) you can send them an email to update your contact if you wish.

I've not found an online service you can't switch emails with.

Re: Tell HN: Lost then regained access to Google account, with correct credentials

#99

Post by wallstprog »

dt3ft wrote: post #50

This story keeps coming up. When you pay for email, you get a customer status. This entails a SLA and a bunch of other rights, which you most likely never get from a free service provider. I hope if those reading these comments still use free email service instead of hosting their own (or paying for it), strongly consider making the switch.

You are paying for gmail, in a coin that Google accepts: your personal information. It's not "free" ...

Re: Tell HN: Lost then regained access to Google account, with correct credentials

#100

Post by waltbosz »

This reminds me of the time that I obtained my original cleartext password for my old tripod.com account by simply emailing their tech support from an email account not associated with the tripod account. The email address from which I contacted them had the same username as my tripod account email, just at a different domain.

Their response email was simply my password. Not a password reset link, not a new random password. No questions asked.

This happened less than 5 years ago, when password hashing should be standard practice. But tripod was created in the 1990s when it wasn't standard, and I guess there was no budget/willingness to refactor the old database and login code.

I was not surprised to hear a few years later that their cleartext password database had been hacked and published.

Post reply on HN