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And people wonder why I don't want to use Google products... The fact that you might be locked of all your accounts for a random bullshit reason (with no suppor

And people wonder why I don't want to use Google products... The fact that you might be locked of all your accounts for a random bullshit reason (with no support either) is completely insane. People reading this here on HN, please don't use Google products for any important matter or it might bite you back one day (basically only what you can afford to lose).

dx034 8y ago
I still love GMail, the interface works better for me than for others. Just use your own domain (with a third party registrar) and you can just swap the front-end if Google decides to ban you. Same with a small company, as long as you have control of your domains and regular backups of the emails, having a fail-over isn't that hard. In this case the real damage is personal accounts, the business accounts could probably be up within a few hours at another provider (plus some more hours until backups are restored).
- realusername 8y ago
  That's a good advice, always have a backup plan for that (and custom domains + email backups are working great as a backup plan).
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    My personal recommendation is that your domain registrar, web host, and email service should all be different parties. Segregate your risk of losing control of all of these at once, it makes recovery drastically easier. Bear in mind, if someone's all in with Google, they might have their domain controlled by Google Domains.
    - martin-adams 8y ago
      This I agree with. I even run my nameservers different to my registrar, meaning that if my registrar has technical issues I can still control the domain routing. If the nameserver company has issues, I can still change nameservers.
    - chimprich 8y ago
      I strongly agree with this, but I'd go slightly further and say your domain registrar should be entirely independent of any other services. At one point I had my domain registered through my ISP, which was run rather eccentrically by a gentleman I eventually had a dispute with. He then (probably illegally) disabled all my DNS records, leaving me without my main email account for a week at a particularly vulnerable point in my life. It was horrific.
    - cm2187 8y ago
      Also a rookie mistake to avoid: the contact email address that you provide your email hosting shouldn’t be the domain hosted on that service. If there is a technical problem with a loss of access to emails and you need to contact them,... ask me how I found out!
      - aogl 8y ago
        Ok. How did you find out? :P
        exikyut 8y ago
        Not GP, but I'm guessing something happened with either email delivery or login, which broke either receiving support emails or being able to login to see any email.
pzh 8y ago
This reminds me to download and remove all my emails from Google’s GMail servers. Does anyone know of a good automated solution to do this on a regular basis?
- yeahsure 8y ago
  Maybe not what you want, but you could do this using a regular pop3 client and set it to delete copies from the server.
- kjeetgill 8y ago
  There's a fairly direct way to dump all of your Google data here: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en I used it for a grepping through years of emails.
- perakojotgenije 8y ago
  http://gmvault.org/ http://gmvault.org/
- josteink 8y ago
  Gmail (still) supports IMAP, so tools like offlineimap should work just fine. https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap
- B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
  Google Takeout can probably be scripted somehow.
  - erichurkman 8y ago
    If you're on G Suite you can use GAM (https://github.com/jay0lee/GAM https://github.com/jay0lee/GAM) to automate mailbox exports directly to mbox files.
- squarefoot 8y ago
  That was the standard de facto way of accessing mail before web interfaces ruined it all: a lot faster than using a browser and you get full access to all your mail for complex searches etc. Any offline client will do; I use Claws Mail since ages where I migrated all my email also from past clients such as Eudora under Windows XP. http://www.claws-mail.org/ http://www.claws-mail.org/ It's multiplatform, very fast and stable and can keep, index and search huge datasets of emails (mine is over 60K messages since mid 90s) in seconds. Backing up/exporting the email database needs only saving the Mail directory in the user's home; I've successfully moved mail directories between Linux and Windows installations of Claws Mail without a hitch. It made Outlook users drop their jaws when they realized how fast it is and they no longer needed to delete years of mails because the client became slow as molasses. All you have to do is configure it to access Google servers like any other client then check the option to delete the mail on the server once it has been downloaded. IIRC this option is checked by default.
setquk 8y ago
Agree entirely. This should apply to all cloud services. If you use them for anything critical, total migration and DR should be part of your exit strategy for if anything like this happens. Everything you have in the cloud should be backed up in neutral formats off line on your property. I’ve had a couple of run ins with google and personal accounts a few years back. Once my sign in was broken for two weeks. I couldn’t sign in with it showing a non descript error. I couldn’t find or get anyone to help. If this was anything business critical then it would have been pack up and go home. Google apps support is notoriously crap as well. Been there, done that, left quickly.
- c12 8y ago
  Not that everyone can afford such things but a few companies I have worked for in the past have mirrored their entire cloud infrastructure across more than one provider (aws, google, azure, etc). One was co-located at one data center that had connectivity issues and they had all traffic automatically rerouted to their development stack in the office which operated as production while their colo sorted out issues.
ladzoppelin 8y ago
As a Google Apps/For work admin I also have experienced really hostile policies and support in the past. Its really shortsighted of Google because now they want companies to use their GCP platform which I find insane.
dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
One thing that makes me always wonder is that Google can get away without proper Customer Service. Usually if that kind of thing happens and an employee refuses to disclose the details, you talk to their manager and so on, and if the company still refuses to restore the service, you get it to the court for illegal termination of the contract. I mean, you can't terminate the contract with another company without explaining why (and no, "you violated the terms but we can't tell you exactly what" is not an explanation.)
- plantain 8y ago
  Except this story doesn't add up, because Google's customer service for even small companies on Google Apps is pretty good.
  - johnnyfaehell 8y ago
    The story is it's Google Payments that triggered the shutdown. The friend of the writer would have been the Google Apps user.
    - Jksmth 8y ago
      Google Payments is ridiculous. They escheated my merchant money to Delaware government, but their supports referse to provide the merchantment ID to me so that I can't find back the merchantment from Delaware goverment. It is like threw my money into the ocean. They said Delaware government didn't give them the ID. Who know.
  - askvictor 8y ago
    I'm guessing that the company isn't using G-Suite, but rather a bunch of gmail accounts set up as 'work' accounts. If they were on G-suite, they'd have a support line to call.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - 8y ago
giancarlostoro 8y ago
Suggested alternatives? Anyone ever had a similar / bad experience with Microsoft?
- swebs 8y ago
  I've had nothing but horrible experiences with Microsoft. Frequent down times, high latency, surprise licensing fee increases, vendor lock-in, software that gets worse every year. I wouldn't wish Outlook or Skype on my worse enemy. Also if you don't pay up, they might raid your office and take your computers. https://torrentfreak.com/microsoft-sued-over-mafia-like-anti-piracy-raid-120621/ https://torrentfreak.com/microsoft-sued-over-mafia-like-anti...
- wrycoder 8y ago
  I always recommend fastmail. I’ve used them for decades with no issues. On the rare occasion they have an issue, they go all out to fix it quickly and keep the user community informed. I once asked them to trace a delivery problem through their server logs, which they did in less than an hour - they politely showed me where I screwed up! I can be logged in and making changes from multiple platforms simultaneously and everything works flawlessly. In addition, I think they are honest when they claim they don’t scan or sell my data. Their web app is very good. (Previously, I was using Gnus.) I also use iOS Mail to access fastmail via IMAP, because the VIP “folder” feature is great for cherrypicking.
gnicholas 8y ago
Reliance on google is dangerous for sure. A couple months ago my startup’s popular Chrome extension was unceremoniously yanked from the Chrome store. It took weeks to get the situation resolved, and even then it was only because I live in Silicon Valley and know people at Google who could ping the Chrome team until it was fixed. In the meantime, our most popular product was sidelined. We have since ported to Firefox Quantum to be less reliant on Google. https://medium.com/@BeeLineReader/google-yanked-my-chrome-extension-this-sunday-d9c481e285cb https://medium.com/@BeeLineReader/google-yanked-my-chrome-ex...
- Hoasi 8y ago
  > Reliance on google is dangerous for sure. It is also unnecessary. While I understand the convenience, there are plenty of better solutions to use over Google, especially for a software company.
  - gnicholas 8y ago
    I’m curious to know how a company like mine [1] might offer the same value to users while avoiding google. When we first launched (on HN, I should note), we checked the browsers that people used to come to our site. It was roughly 90/10 Chrome/Firefox. That’s why we built our first extension for Chrome (and later built for Firefox also). Don’t we have to meet our users where they are? Would love to hear your ideas! 1: http://www.BeeLineReader.com/individual http://www.BeeLineReader.com/individual
    - cptskippy 8y ago
      > http://www.BeeLineReader.com/individual http://www.BeeLineReader.com/individual Completely off topic but do you receive feedback from some users that your color gradients actually make it harder to read? I was struggling to read your landing page, my eyes kept were involuntarily flitting all over the page. My eyes kept jumping around scanning like they would at a traffic intersection or a pool (I was a lifeguard) for activity. It was kind of weird and stressful.
abrookewood 8y ago
This is exactly right. Amazon or Microsoft would never do this to you if you were using one of their services. And if, for some reason they had to, you could talk to them about it. I really hope someone for Google is listening ... I WANT you guys to be successful so that we have more competition in the market. But honestly, you just keep shooting yourselves in the feet. If you treat Consumers like crap, then you must expect Enterprise customers to be concerned that you are going to do the same thing to them. It's not like this is an isolated story either ... Google dropping the ban hammer on someone is a recurring theme and it makes me question whether I should be looking at alternatives.
- dnomad 8y ago
  > Amazon or Microsoft would never do this to you if you were using one of their services. And if, for some reason they had to, you could talk to them about it. Do you seriously believe this? You understand people get locked out of the cloud accounts with Amazon and Microsoft all the time. And with Amazon and Microsoft they lose much more than access to their (free!) email account, they lose access to Kindle Books and Software Licenses that they've paid for with real money. That's a much bigger deal. The moral of this story is that US citizens and businesses have zero recourse when they run afoul of web-based services. They have no real legal rights to their digital property. If the US had some kind of GDPR-like law that allowed customers an irrevocable right to their own data then this wouldn't be such a big deal. Indeed it might even spur some competition. But today you've got absolutely nothing. Today the onus is completely on each person to protect their own digital assets.
  - psergeant 8y ago
    > Do you seriously believe this? I know that even on a pretty small spend AWS had assigned us an account rep who would have moved heaven and earth if this had happened to us. I know Amazon retail has real humans in Ireland who will take my calls and take me seriously when I have problems. I got an email recently from Google saying they were required to inform me they’d hired another gigantic Indian outsourcing company to do ... some kind of customer support work.
gormz 8y ago
What's a good gmail alternative?
- nol13 8y ago
  lycos! No, really. even though free accounts ending. Actually not even sure if you can sign up at the moment. Has basically 'just worked' for years though, hopefully they stay in business. :/
  - gormz 8y ago
    Doesn't look like there's anymore active signup :/
- CryoLogic 8y ago
  Zoho is excellent and fills almost all the gaps of GSuite.
- taneq 8y ago
  Your own email account on a VPS or other web hosting? I've been doing this for my work email for years, moved my personal email over at the start of the year and so far it's worked perfectly. Thunderbird's support for long email threads isn't as good as Gmail's but that's about the only downside I've seen (and that's a downside of Thunderbird, not of the approach to email).
ganeshkrishnan 8y ago
Exact same thing happened to our previous startup cohort. To top it off the dev already had a banned account before he joined the startup and had a "poisoned" banned play account. He logged in via google multi-login account to the startup and in a few days google banned the entire startup. The whole seed funding, adsense, docs everything gone up in smoke. Funny thing; only adwords was not banned and they kept siphoning off funds for non existential apps. The Founders found everything banned and didn't bother to check if adwords was also banned; and it wasn't. Sneaky google. Sneaky
- dmak 8y ago
  How did you resolve it? Did anything happen to the employee?
  - jkaplowitz 8y ago
    If all he did was multi-login without otherwise doing anything inappropriate, and the company generally allows signing in to personal accounts, I hope nothing happened to him. That's no reason to discipline or fire someone, even if that was what triggered Google's algorithms.
  - ganeshkrishnan 8y ago
    The startup was dissolved. One more startup with $60 million funding is winding down : https://www.smartcompany.com.au/startupsmart/news-analysis/australian-startup-unlockd-taking-google-to-court/ https://www.smartcompany.com.au/startupsmart/news-analysis/a...
- progval 8y ago
  Sounds like a nice way to sink a competitor.
antihero 8y ago
It was a story like this years ago that prompted me to switch to FastMail. Have never looked back.

dx034 8y ago

I still love GMail, the interface works better for me than for others. Just use your own domain (with a third party registrar) and you can just swap the front-end if Google decides to ban you. Same with a small company, as long as you have control of your domains and regular backups of the emails, having a fail-over isn't that hard. In this case the real damage is personal accounts, the business accounts could probably be up within a few hours at another provider (plus some more hours until backups are restored).

realusername 8y ago
That's a good advice, always have a backup plan for that (and custom domains + email backups are working great as a backup plan).
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  My personal recommendation is that your domain registrar, web host, and email service should all be different parties. Segregate your risk of losing control of all of these at once, it makes recovery drastically easier. Bear in mind, if someone's all in with Google, they might have their domain controlled by Google Domains.
  - martin-adams 8y ago
    This I agree with. I even run my nameservers different to my registrar, meaning that if my registrar has technical issues I can still control the domain routing. If the nameserver company has issues, I can still change nameservers.
  - chimprich 8y ago
    I strongly agree with this, but I'd go slightly further and say your domain registrar should be entirely independent of any other services. At one point I had my domain registered through my ISP, which was run rather eccentrically by a gentleman I eventually had a dispute with. He then (probably illegally) disabled all my DNS records, leaving me without my main email account for a week at a particularly vulnerable point in my life. It was horrific.
  - cm2187 8y ago
    Also a rookie mistake to avoid: the contact email address that you provide your email hosting shouldn’t be the domain hosted on that service. If there is a technical problem with a loss of access to emails and you need to contact them,... ask me how I found out!
    - aogl 8y ago
      Ok. How did you find out? :P
      - exikyut 8y ago
        Not GP, but I'm guessing something happened with either email delivery or login, which broke either receiving support emails or being able to login to see any email.

pzh 8y ago

This reminds me to download and remove all my emails from Google’s GMail servers. Does anyone know of a good automated solution to do this on a regular basis?

yeahsure 8y ago
Maybe not what you want, but you could do this using a regular pop3 client and set it to delete copies from the server.
kjeetgill 8y ago
There's a fairly direct way to dump all of your Google data here: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en I used it for a grepping through years of emails.
perakojotgenije 8y ago
http://gmvault.org/ http://gmvault.org/
josteink 8y ago
Gmail (still) supports IMAP, so tools like offlineimap should work just fine. https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap
B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
Google Takeout can probably be scripted somehow.
- erichurkman 8y ago
  If you're on G Suite you can use GAM (https://github.com/jay0lee/GAM https://github.com/jay0lee/GAM) to automate mailbox exports directly to mbox files.
squarefoot 8y ago
That was the standard de facto way of accessing mail before web interfaces ruined it all: a lot faster than using a browser and you get full access to all your mail for complex searches etc. Any offline client will do; I use Claws Mail since ages where I migrated all my email also from past clients such as Eudora under Windows XP. http://www.claws-mail.org/ http://www.claws-mail.org/ It's multiplatform, very fast and stable and can keep, index and search huge datasets of emails (mine is over 60K messages since mid 90s) in seconds. Backing up/exporting the email database needs only saving the Mail directory in the user's home; I've successfully moved mail directories between Linux and Windows installations of Claws Mail without a hitch. It made Outlook users drop their jaws when they realized how fast it is and they no longer needed to delete years of mails because the client became slow as molasses. All you have to do is configure it to access Google servers like any other client then check the option to delete the mail on the server once it has been downloaded. IIRC this option is checked by default.

setquk 8y ago

Agree entirely. This should apply to all cloud services. If you use them for anything critical, total migration and DR should be part of your exit strategy for if anything like this happens. Everything you have in the cloud should be backed up in neutral formats off line on your property. I’ve had a couple of run ins with google and personal accounts a few years back. Once my sign in was broken for two weeks. I couldn’t sign in with it showing a non descript error. I couldn’t find or get anyone to help. If this was anything business critical then it would have been pack up and go home. Google apps support is notoriously crap as well. Been there, done that, left quickly.

c12 8y ago
Not that everyone can afford such things but a few companies I have worked for in the past have mirrored their entire cloud infrastructure across more than one provider (aws, google, azure, etc). One was co-located at one data center that had connectivity issues and they had all traffic automatically rerouted to their development stack in the office which operated as production while their colo sorted out issues.

ladzoppelin 8y ago

As a Google Apps/For work admin I also have experienced really hostile policies and support in the past. Its really shortsighted of Google because now they want companies to use their GCP platform which I find insane.

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago

One thing that makes me always wonder is that Google can get away without proper Customer Service. Usually if that kind of thing happens and an employee refuses to disclose the details, you talk to their manager and so on, and if the company still refuses to restore the service, you get it to the court for illegal termination of the contract. I mean, you can't terminate the contract with another company without explaining why (and no, "you violated the terms but we can't tell you exactly what" is not an explanation.)

plantain 8y ago
Except this story doesn't add up, because Google's customer service for even small companies on Google Apps is pretty good.
- johnnyfaehell 8y ago
  The story is it's Google Payments that triggered the shutdown. The friend of the writer would have been the Google Apps user.
  - Jksmth 8y ago
    Google Payments is ridiculous. They escheated my merchant money to Delaware government, but their supports referse to provide the merchantment ID to me so that I can't find back the merchantment from Delaware goverment. It is like threw my money into the ocean. They said Delaware government didn't give them the ID. Who know.
- askvictor 8y ago
  I'm guessing that the company isn't using G-Suite, but rather a bunch of gmail accounts set up as 'work' accounts. If they were on G-suite, they'd have a support line to call.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - 8y ago

giancarlostoro 8y ago

Suggested alternatives? Anyone ever had a similar / bad experience with Microsoft?

swebs 8y ago
I've had nothing but horrible experiences with Microsoft. Frequent down times, high latency, surprise licensing fee increases, vendor lock-in, software that gets worse every year. I wouldn't wish Outlook or Skype on my worse enemy. Also if you don't pay up, they might raid your office and take your computers. https://torrentfreak.com/microsoft-sued-over-mafia-like-anti-piracy-raid-120621/ https://torrentfreak.com/microsoft-sued-over-mafia-like-anti...
wrycoder 8y ago
I always recommend fastmail. I’ve used them for decades with no issues. On the rare occasion they have an issue, they go all out to fix it quickly and keep the user community informed. I once asked them to trace a delivery problem through their server logs, which they did in less than an hour - they politely showed me where I screwed up! I can be logged in and making changes from multiple platforms simultaneously and everything works flawlessly. In addition, I think they are honest when they claim they don’t scan or sell my data. Their web app is very good. (Previously, I was using Gnus.) I also use iOS Mail to access fastmail via IMAP, because the VIP “folder” feature is great for cherrypicking.

gnicholas 8y ago

Reliance on google is dangerous for sure. A couple months ago my startup’s popular Chrome extension was unceremoniously yanked from the Chrome store. It took weeks to get the situation resolved, and even then it was only because I live in Silicon Valley and know people at Google who could ping the Chrome team until it was fixed. In the meantime, our most popular product was sidelined. We have since ported to Firefox Quantum to be less reliant on Google. https://medium.com/@BeeLineReader/google-yanked-my-chrome-extension-this-sunday-d9c481e285cb https://medium.com/@BeeLineReader/google-yanked-my-chrome-ex...

Hoasi 8y ago
> Reliance on google is dangerous for sure. It is also unnecessary. While I understand the convenience, there are plenty of better solutions to use over Google, especially for a software company.
- gnicholas 8y ago
  I’m curious to know how a company like mine [1] might offer the same value to users while avoiding google. When we first launched (on HN, I should note), we checked the browsers that people used to come to our site. It was roughly 90/10 Chrome/Firefox. That’s why we built our first extension for Chrome (and later built for Firefox also). Don’t we have to meet our users where they are? Would love to hear your ideas! 1: http://www.BeeLineReader.com/individual http://www.BeeLineReader.com/individual
  - cptskippy 8y ago
    > http://www.BeeLineReader.com/individual http://www.BeeLineReader.com/individual Completely off topic but do you receive feedback from some users that your color gradients actually make it harder to read? I was struggling to read your landing page, my eyes kept were involuntarily flitting all over the page. My eyes kept jumping around scanning like they would at a traffic intersection or a pool (I was a lifeguard) for activity. It was kind of weird and stressful.

abrookewood 8y ago

This is exactly right. Amazon or Microsoft would never do this to you if you were using one of their services. And if, for some reason they had to, you could talk to them about it. I really hope someone for Google is listening ... I WANT you guys to be successful so that we have more competition in the market. But honestly, you just keep shooting yourselves in the feet. If you treat Consumers like crap, then you must expect Enterprise customers to be concerned that you are going to do the same thing to them. It's not like this is an isolated story either ... Google dropping the ban hammer on someone is a recurring theme and it makes me question whether I should be looking at alternatives.

dnomad 8y ago
> Amazon or Microsoft would never do this to you if you were using one of their services. And if, for some reason they had to, you could talk to them about it. Do you seriously believe this? You understand people get locked out of the cloud accounts with Amazon and Microsoft all the time. And with Amazon and Microsoft they lose much more than access to their (free!) email account, they lose access to Kindle Books and Software Licenses that they've paid for with real money. That's a much bigger deal. The moral of this story is that US citizens and businesses have zero recourse when they run afoul of web-based services. They have no real legal rights to their digital property. If the US had some kind of GDPR-like law that allowed customers an irrevocable right to their own data then this wouldn't be such a big deal. Indeed it might even spur some competition. But today you've got absolutely nothing. Today the onus is completely on each person to protect their own digital assets.
- psergeant 8y ago
  > Do you seriously believe this? I know that even on a pretty small spend AWS had assigned us an account rep who would have moved heaven and earth if this had happened to us. I know Amazon retail has real humans in Ireland who will take my calls and take me seriously when I have problems. I got an email recently from Google saying they were required to inform me they’d hired another gigantic Indian outsourcing company to do ... some kind of customer support work.

gormz 8y ago

What's a good gmail alternative?

nol13 8y ago
lycos! No, really. even though free accounts ending. Actually not even sure if you can sign up at the moment. Has basically 'just worked' for years though, hopefully they stay in business. :/
- gormz 8y ago
  Doesn't look like there's anymore active signup :/
CryoLogic 8y ago
Zoho is excellent and fills almost all the gaps of GSuite.
taneq 8y ago
Your own email account on a VPS or other web hosting? I've been doing this for my work email for years, moved my personal email over at the start of the year and so far it's worked perfectly. Thunderbird's support for long email threads isn't as good as Gmail's but that's about the only downside I've seen (and that's a downside of Thunderbird, not of the approach to email).

ganeshkrishnan 8y ago

Exact same thing happened to our previous startup cohort. To top it off the dev already had a banned account before he joined the startup and had a "poisoned" banned play account. He logged in via google multi-login account to the startup and in a few days google banned the entire startup. The whole seed funding, adsense, docs everything gone up in smoke. Funny thing; only adwords was not banned and they kept siphoning off funds for non existential apps. The Founders found everything banned and didn't bother to check if adwords was also banned; and it wasn't. Sneaky google. Sneaky

dmak 8y ago
How did you resolve it? Did anything happen to the employee?
- jkaplowitz 8y ago
  If all he did was multi-login without otherwise doing anything inappropriate, and the company generally allows signing in to personal accounts, I hope nothing happened to him. That's no reason to discipline or fire someone, even if that was what triggered Google's algorithms.
- ganeshkrishnan 8y ago
  The startup was dissolved. One more startup with $60 million funding is winding down : https://www.smartcompany.com.au/startupsmart/news-analysis/australian-startup-unlockd-taking-google-to-court/ https://www.smartcompany.com.au/startupsmart/news-analysis/a...
progval 8y ago
Sounds like a nice way to sink a competitor.

antihero 8y ago

It was a story like this years ago that prompted me to switch to FastMail. Have never looked back.