Google Is Eating Our Mail
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Google Is Eating Our Mail
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Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#2Add another perspective to this. Once I updated my phone, and google would not accept new google Authenticator codes after set up. Locked out of 15 years of email.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#3Add another perspective to this. Once I updated my phone, and google would not accept new google Authenticator codes after set up. Locked out of 15 years of email.
You probably tried this, no idea if it ever works, but in case someone reads your comment and is in the same boat: https://support.google.com/accounts/contact/forum_ar_escalat...
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#4Add another perspective to this. Once I updated my phone, and google would not accept new google Authenticator codes after set up. Locked out of 15 years of email.
Did the backup codes not work either?
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#5Add another perspective to this. Once I updated my phone, and google would not accept new google Authenticator codes after set up. Locked out of 15 years of email.
They specifically provide 10 one use codes for this type of situation that should be saved somewhere. Also, email should be backed up locally if it’s important, just like anything else.
I’m not sure what else people want from a secure email service you don’t have to pay for. Also, any work around the 2FA by a human simply means less security for everyone.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#6As someone who runs their own personal mail server, this annoys me to no end.
I set up DKIM, SPF, and reverse-DNS records and resented every moment of it. Even after all that, there's some chance that an email from my server will be marked as insecure/spam or otherwise just not be delivered because Google has come up with some new brilliant mail security/auth/permission scheme that the world has to adopt tomorrow or be cut off from all Gmail users.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#7A while back I'd explored trying to own my data, especially with email, and found that the efforts involved in hosting your own email server were tantamount to a full-time job.
The amount of fighting you have to do to stay on everyone's whitelists is absurd.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#8Google has no incentive to fix these kinds of problems.
It's big enough that when someone complains that a message sent wasn't received, the intended recipient will say, "I never have problems with my Gmail account. It must be you." And the sender has to switch to Gmail to reliably communicate with the outside world.
I wish this was just paranoia, but we've seen multiple discussions on HN about Google programs and policies that alter the internet in ways that only benefit Big G. It's like we're heading back to the days when people didn't know the difference between AOL and "the internet."
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#9> I'm sure there is no malicious intent behind this
How can anyone be sure of this? This is only one of Google’s practices that seems to follow a pervasive pattern of eroding open internet standards while presenting Google’s own proprietary implementation as somehow superior. Eventually, the open standard loses all meaning because the most popular implementation does not actually adhere to it. Meanwhile, Google reaps enormous benefits in the form of additional signals for its advertising business. How can this not be grounded in malicious intent?
> and that there are some very smart people working on spam prevention at Google.
There are some very smart people working on advertising at Google. The rush to forget the primary nature of Google - it’s an adtech firm - is why they’ve been allowed to skate for so long. Gmail’s spam filtering is just a pretext for passing all email through a machine learning system. Sure, one possible signal emitted by that system is whether a message is spam or not. Perhaps this determination is conflated with wether the message is useful for ad targeting: after all, when viewed from Google’s own perspective certain e-mail messages contain no information which can be used for ad targeting, so they must be spam. The user’s interests are clearly secondary to this.
So, back to the “smart people” working on this: at what point do we begin judging engineers for working at Google? There’s a lot of highly vitriolic criticism that emanates from Google’s workforce on a variety of subjects, but how many of them would actually pull the pin and leave their employer? I don’t have any statistics to offer, but it seems to me that we still have a ways to go before Google has become completely drained of engineering mindshare.
Re: Google Is Eating Our Mail
#10Add another perspective to this. Once I updated my phone, and google would not accept new google Authenticator codes after set up. Locked out of 15 years of email.
I had a fright last time I changed phones. After restoring my backup onto the new phone, I was about to wipe the old one; I did a final pass through my apps just in case... and saw that Google Authenticator configuration did not carry over to the new phone (which makes sens from a security perspective but is a PITA to manage). I had to re-enroll my device with all the services on which I use MFA.
After this episode I made damn sure I had recovery codes stored in a safe place.