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G Suite Horror Story

koolba 8y ago
Just like the old saying goes: “Don’t mix business and pleasure” That means not mixing corporate Gmail (or Outlook, or anything else really) with your personal email. Not using the email for your AWS account to purchase home goods on Amazons retail site. At best your have the mild convenience of a single inbox. At worst Amazon shuts down your AWS account because you open a dispute for a fake Beanie Baby purchased off the retail site.
- cjhanks 8y ago
  Wait what? I have heard a few horror stories about overly-harsh Amazon reviews resulting in a loss of access to AWS. But opening a dispute? Is this true?
  - zatkin 8y ago
    I think what OP is getting at about w/r/t AWS can be clarified by my horror story: I once was using third party software (recommended by AWS) to upload 1 TB of data to AWS Glacier. The individual files were quite large, and if at any point during the upload the connection was lost, the third party software would start over from the beginning. I found this out after noticing that none of my backups had been uploaded after leaving it running overnight. I ended up getting charged something like $20K, which was insane! So I disputed this to Amazon, and they agreed to avoid charging me in exchange for a deletion of my account. Which was associated with my old Amazon.com account.
    - pkaye 8y ago
      Were you able to make another Amazon account after that or do they ban you entirely?
      - zatkin 8y ago
        I actually just created a new AWS account and changed the email on my Amazon account.
    - mehrdadn 8y ago
      Confused, does AWS Glacier cost $20K/TB or something? How do you get charged that much just after one night of unchecked uploading?
      - zatkin 8y ago
        The third party software was doing a mixture of writing (uploading), and reading (to verify contents had been uploaded). It was continually trying to upload a 1 GB file for well over 12 hours. It's been a long time since this happened so I don't recall the exact figures, but I remember having some 4 or 5 figure charge from AWS. I think the third party software was just bad at handling large single file uploads over residential internet.
- dingo_bat 8y ago
  > At best your have the mild convenience of a single inbox. Which is also not an issue if you use a decent email client. Even Win10 default Mail app supports unified inbox for multiple accounts.
- gingerlime 8y ago
  I would say "Don't even mix business with business with Amazon" (not very) funnily enough, we have a business AWS account that is also used for Amazon (buying stuff for the office), as well as Amazon seller central. We've set up MFA on the AWS account, but it's in total conflict with the seller central account, which keeps asking for setting up MFA as well. If we set both, we're almost totally locked-out of our AWS. Somehow the MFA device gets mixed up or something. We can kinda squeeze-in if we try a few times with alternating between codes. Seller central seems connected to the Amazon retail, but not AWS. Totally bizarre. We've contacted AWS MFA support several times, but there's basically no solution for this. They claim it's all somehow integrated, but something isn't quite well integrated as it should be.
  - exikyut 8y ago
    Maybe try pinging AWS's VP, https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jeffbarr https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jeffbarr (email in bio link). My guess is that you might be the only person/company who has this specific setup, so there's either no ticket, or it has a priority of -99999. Still probably worth headscratching about internally... (If emailing works out, I'd be very interested to know!)
zatkin 8y ago
It's stories like these that reinforce my own justification for running my own email server. I would recommend you run your own email server - it's both fun (you get to set it up yourself, add any features you want), and rewarding (you don't have to worry about the "rug being swept from under your feet"). The only caveat is time - time for SMTP servers around the world to know that your mail server's IP is not sending spam - and filling out some forms to unblock the server's IP address. Since moving in 2014, I have had no hassles at all, and I continue to tweak things to my liking.
- memset 8y ago
  Genuine question: one reason everyone moved to Gmail is because it was so damn good at spam filtering. What do you use today? Spamassasin out of the box? Or plugins or modifications? Or something else entirely?
  - dpedu 8y ago
    Not OP, but I use both Spamassassin and DSPAM. It catches most spam but I do see a couple every week.
  - biktor_gj 8y ago
    At work we used Ironports for years until Cisco, as usual,started making a mess. Nowadays we use Mailcleaner with a little bit of tweaking in a VM. It's a little worse than IronPort when Ironport was good, but so much better than what Cisco's systems were doing for us when we shut the old system down. On a side note, I really don't understand why people say it's hard to run a mail server, it really isn't. It can be hard if you go full postfix+spamassasin on plain config files and configure everything without any help. Since 2005, we've been running: Exchange 2003 Exchange 2010 Exchange 2016 Watchguard smtp Proxies and antispam External provider's antispam services Cisco Ironports (first a dual node cluster with some older machines, then Cisco came and forced us to upgrade to some C170 which were slow as hell) We've run through countless updates on the exchange servers, we have mailboxes with more than 50Gb of content, about 1Tb of database sizes, the biggest problem we had, came when we had a two node DAG in Exchange 2010 and the RPC Client Access Server didn't correctly change when Outlook 2007 was open leaving some clients trying to connect to the server that was rebooting. We've also changed IP addresses a few times, but if you change your SPF records correctly, and pay for a good IP range you won't have any problems. Sure, you can't have your mail server on an IP range flagged as spam, but you also wouldn't buy a 100.000 dollar car and put 50 dollar wheels on it!
kyrra 8y ago
It's worth noting that this person posted to /r/Google[0] before writing the blog post. One thing that doesn't make any sense to me is this comment: > When I login it always redirect to my @yourdomain.com with no gmail, drive, etc. Even if I clean the browser history. I do not understand this even. So it sounds like this person can still log into their Gmail account, but it redirects to the deleted gsuite account. That definitely doesn't seem right, but it seems like the Gmail account could still be there? [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/94gl4k/gsuite_cancelled_my_subscription_now_i_cant_use/ https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/94gl4k/gsuite_cance...
- Nition 8y ago
  Their support ticket has some more info in subsequent posts from both them and others: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/apps/RIHSJ4LIXwE;context-place=forum/apps https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/apps/RIHSJ4LI...
  - kyrra 8y ago
    Thanks. Reading that a the help docs[0] explain it better. I wonder if they can restore the business account and then do takeout on it. [0] https://support.google.com/work/mail/answer/6243136?hl=en&ref_topic=6248365 https://support.google.com/work/mail/answer/6243136?hl=en&re...
ValentineC 8y ago
I wanted to see how people were being convinced to link their Gmail accounts with a G Suite account, so I tried hunting for the option to sign up for this "Gmail for Work" service. The links keep sending me to either G Suite's standard landing page, or to admin.google.com, which only works with G Suite domains. I did find the help pages for the service: https://support.google.com/work/mail/answer/6236599 https://support.google.com/work/mail/answer/6236599
KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
TBH this just sounds like a bug, if google support weren't so incompetent they would make this right and the story would be forgotten. But they are so this will be another black stain on Google's name.
- Nition 8y ago
  Someone in the support thread[1] links to an official Google page[2] where it says under 'Before you unlock additional G Suite features': > G Suite: You can continue to use your personal Gmail account. However, if you unlock additional features and then cancel business email powered by G Suite, you can't go back to using your original free Gmail address. Sounds like a terrible 'feature' though. [1] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/apps/RIHSJ4LIXwE;context-place=forum/apps https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/apps/RIHSJ4LI... [2] https://support.google.com/work/mail/answer/6243136?hl=en&ref_topic=6248365 https://support.google.com/work/mail/answer/6243136?hl=en&re...
Apocryphon 8y ago
Squeaky wheel gets the grease. The more this story is upvoted, retweeted, and spread, the likelier that Google will be forced to deal with a potential PR backlash. Customer service via viral outrage is an unfortunate consequence of these mass scale services (and companies unwilling to properly invest in human support staff to improve the quality of customer success). It's slightly similar to human flesh search engines in China [0]. Maybe there's a way to organize crowdsourced feedback whenever these tech giants fail to address particularly bad customer issues. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_flesh_search_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_flesh_search_engine
- michelledepeil 8y ago
  The original post is yet another example of taking to personal blogs to get proper customer support for critical services. I find this concept terrible. The eventual, theoretical end-point is that only the elite, social-media connected individuals will get help with their Gmail issues. I'm not worried about me, I'm worried about 70 year-olds who don't run blogs and don't have 40k insta followers. So yes, crowdsourcing such a thing, in a simple, clear way, would be an absolute blessing. Think Github issues but then 1000x more accessible for average consumers.
  - reitanqild 8y ago
    > I find this concept terrible. The eventual, theoretical end-point is that only the elite, social-media connected individuals will get help with their Gmail issues. Another, better outcome would be if Google get tired of getting bad PR and decides to 1. remove traps like the one we are discussing and/or 2. fix their support system.
WheelsAtLarge 8y ago
And here's an example of free never really being free. It sux but when you pay nothing, expect nothing. That's really the lesson to learn. I once had a "free" website that was running for years. One day it was all gone, no notice, no warning. Lucky I backed it up. I was back in business in a few hours..
- fauigerzigerk 8y ago
  That's not the lession. We do pay Google enough to make billions of profits every quarter by granting them access to our data. Google's terms of service give us no guarantees at all, but neither do other consumer or small business oriented cloud services that charge real money. I seem to be one of the few people who actually read the terms of service before starting to seriously depend on a provider. Usually, you don't have any rights at all. Most services can kick out paying customers without notice, without explanation and without recourse. If you want real contractual guarantees (SLAs with penalties) you need to go all the way to enterprise services and they are extremely expensive. In my view, the pragmatic lession if you're not an enterprise customer is to choose profitable mid-size providers that are not too cheap and combine a few of them or combine with on-premises infrastructure (that is your PC :) to avoid any single point of failure.
client4 8y ago
I was banned without explanation in 2011 from Google. No calendar, no email, no phone contacts! Gone immediately and with no ability to get them back. I only regained access because of a Reddit post.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
ramshanker 8y ago
Temporary workaround: Everyone should perform manual download of their data once each 6 month or so. https://www.wikihow.tech/Back-Up-Your-Gmail-Account https://www.wikihow.tech/Back-Up-Your-Gmail-Account
- kumarvvr 8y ago
  Thank you so much for this.
- nhebb 8y ago
  I got to step 5 > You have no services enabled for which data can be exported. What? I've had this (paid) GSuite account for years. That's a bit discouraging.
  - davchana 8y ago
    You might need to check with your administrator (or if you yourself are managing it, you need to log in with admin account), there is a option somewhere there at admin.google.com to let your users export data.
    - nhebb 8y ago
      Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately, I searched the settings and can't find anything that seems related that isn't already set to ON. I'm the only user (Super Admin).
      - danielx 8y ago
        This KB article might help: https://support.google.com/a/answer/6396995?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/answer/6396995?hl=en
- pandasun 8y ago
  I wish I had done this in 2015. I lost the only pictures of my now deceased dog in Google Drive when I was locked out for no reason. Except I didn't regain access because I didn't make a popular Reddit or blog post. Apparently Google's "customer service" runs as follows: 1. Don't provide any customer service email address. 2. Don't provide any contact form. 3. Don't provide any phone number. 4. Don't respond when people resort to sending snail mail. (Yes really I tried and I'm not the only one). 5. Provide a forum where 999/1000 posts don't get a response. 6. Suddenly respond if it affects public relations. (ea. a popular Reddit post).
hellofunk 8y ago
I have a GSuite subscription that I’ve been thinking of canceling. I wonder if there is an obvious way to know if this could happen to me. I have emails from it’s main email address forwarded to a personal account, and probably also have the personal account setup as a concact perhaps. I will have to thoroughly read through the settings. My personal gmail account is 14 years old.
- ValentineC 8y ago
  If you have a paid G Suite subscription, you'll have access to their phone/email/chat support [1], and you can call them to find out if your Gmail's linked. I think the OP's problem was upgrading to G Suite via a new "Gmail for Business" option [2], which I still can't find on my personal Gmail accounts. [1] https://support.google.com/a/answer/1047213 https://support.google.com/a/answer/1047213 [2] https://support.google.com/work/mail/answer/6236599 https://support.google.com/work/mail/answer/6236599
xab9 8y ago
Question: how do you move away from gmail? Phone providers in the last decade came up with number transfers (I can talk about Europe only), but how do I transfer my gmail.com address? I have hundreds of registrations tied to my gmail (been using it since it was available, more than a decade now), some are for my bank, others are for webshops, countrywide tax management system, ebay, amazon, healthcare, friends etc. I read how people are not relying on gmail and running their own servers, but how do they do it? How do they cut loose the ties with their past?
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  This is what I've done: sync your Gmail account with a regular mail client and backup the mail clients database so as not to lose any old emails. Step two create new email address with dedicated email provider, one known to have good customer support. Step three, stop giving out your Gmail address, and over time update your email address on all the services you use. You can't take your @gmail.com address with you to a different provider, I think that would break the way the Internet works.
  - giancarlostoro 8y ago
    Another option is to get a personal domain where the dedicated email provider can support. If you own the domain to your email, you can switch providers more seamlessly, of course you gotta back up your emails through a third party client. Maybe a third party web client you can host yourself that stores your emails. Maybe something like Mailpile: https://www.mailpile.is/ https://www.mailpile.is/
    - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
      Oh yeah, I should have mentioned I registered two domains. One is my firstnamelastname.com and the other is k45j.com so I use a364@k45j.com because it’s short and unambiguous to say over the phone.
  - keypusher 8y ago
    You can have gmail forward everything to the new address.
marcus_holmes 8y ago
Google's nightmare-bad UI strikes again.
viach 8y ago
Imagine having online exchange auth to be based on the lost email. Indeed, a horror story.
- Havoc 8y ago
  Had that with a bank & phone number I lost. Guess who got a OTP via snail mail lol
rkagerer 8y ago
Sorry to hear about your woes. Google should be ashamed and embarrassed that they still haven't fixed this. I ran into a similar problem years ago after they acquired Postini and forced us all to migrate. GSuite was called Google Apps at the time, and it cannibalized my personal email (which originally used my own domain, not GMail). Despite numerous contacts with various support channels and even nagging dev googlers at I/O about it I never managed to get it properly severed again. Wound up losing all my history from a lot of Google services linked to the original account. Doesn't help there's also a bug in the Google Play / Android setup wizard where it refuses to recognize the me%olddomain.com@gtempaccount addresses (thinks % is invalid), presenting another impediment to trying to manually extract stuff. Shame Google, shame!
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ddtaylor 8y ago
  The lesson I learned a long time ago is Google products are great until you need to contact someone. I'm sure a few people have some ability to directly contact a real person at the company, but 99% of us are stuck with their product support forums that OP linked to, which frankly are terrible and rarely solve any real problems - I would highly doubt if any of their "representatives" can actually do anything but show you existing help documents.
  - e40 8y ago
    Calling the product support forums terrible is being way too kind. They are worse than terrible because they give you hope. I've used them dozens of times over the years, and never once has a solution come from them.
    - stoolpigeon 8y ago
      Yes. When they turn up in my search results for an issue it always makes me sad because the threads never have useful resolution.
scarejunba 8y ago
Holy shit! This is a _terrible_ user experience. What an absolute nightmare. I can't imagine some PM saw this and decided to okay it. Wow. The only reason I can guess that it didn't pop up sooner is that no one uses this product.
freakynit 8y ago
Companies these days spend like maniacs on UI, but can't even get the basic UX right.
Animats 8y ago
Always remember, with Google, you're not the customer, you're the product. As such, you have no power to demand anything.
- dingo_bat 8y ago
  One would think that applies to the free users, not the paying customers.
SpaceManNabs 8y ago
Am I in a position to be susceptible to this? My personal Gmail is used for my data science/dota blog hosted on Google App Engine. I am using the free quota stuff. I don't think I upgraded to business or anything. So scary :(
z3t4 8y ago
Even if you store the data in the "cloud", you should still make backups! If the service doesn't allow you to make backups, then use another service! If the data is important, you should have backups! I know how boring backups are, but it can be fully automated. (if the data is very important you also want offline backups though) Just don't forget to test the backups at regular intervals, to see if it's possible to recover from a backup.
8ytecoder 8y ago
Mail: personal domain with GSuite backed up by IMAP every day Contacts: backup on multiple devices Drive: full data on at least one hard drive at all times Photos: use via Google drive instead of Google photos directly. That allows you to backup like any other data. All of this must then be backed up off of the hard disk. Our lives are all digital these days. Memories, financial documents, important addresses and phone numbers - everything is digital. Treat it like you'd treat anything valuable. Also, don't assume something catastrophic. Something as simple as a stolen credit card that you forgot to update in one service is enough to lock you out. Or a bug.
- remusrm 8y ago
  How about incoming email and other functions?
- exikyut 8y ago
  Wait, Google Photos doesn't allow backup? I had no idea. Nice.
  - izacus 8y ago
    I think you misunderstood something. You can export all your photos via Takeout... or flip a switch that makes them appear in your Drive to use more convenient sync tools.
    - ValentineC 8y ago
      Nice, it looks like they finally enabled the option [1] for G Suite users [2]. It wasn't available before [3]. [1] https://support.google.com/drive/answer/6156103 https://support.google.com/drive/answer/6156103 [2] https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2017/12/changing-how-you-view-photos-and-videos.html https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2017/12/changing-how-yo... [3] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/photos/hMeOfq0QsWU;context-place=topicsearchin/photos/category$3Amanaging-photos-and-videos https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/photos/hMeOfq...
bmarquez 8y ago
This is scary. I rely on a legacy free G Suite account, so if paying users have problems, I'd definitely be screwed. In general I've found it difficult to get a hold of a live human at Google. The one time I was successful was after buying a Google Nexus phone and requesting hardware support (I think it was through the customer support/returns line.) In contrast, I recently had issues with my iCloud account and was able to get live telephone support. It took 3 hours on hold and being passed through different departments, but I was impressed that Apple actually solved the problem while I was on the line. Didn't spend a penny on iCloud (directly) either.
dirtylowprofile 8y ago
Thank you for the response guys, I am still halfway reading the comments. I hope this problems gets to the guys at Google, I really wanted to recover my personal Gmail account before Google completely wipes it out from their server. Right now, I am on @icloud.com and since Apple is easy to migrate from one device to another I believe this is a nice fresh start. In the future maybe I will try Protonmail but since it requires a "bridge" for paid accounts, maybe I will look into it in the near future.
mamborambo 8y ago
Scary shit here! I just finished the gsuite trial period and started my first paid month, and then to read this horror story is.... I activated Gsuite because it is the best price/capacity value for cloud storage (at the moment) and also I want to evaluate this product as reselling my IT services. I am not going to be happy if I cannot move back into my free gmail in the futue. Google, we need a good response from you.
manigandham 8y ago
Never combine accounts, especially across different service levels. Personal GMail + GSuite is asking for trouble, simply because they are different products aimed at different customers with their own teams and support. Trying to detangle accounts after will never go well. Just setup forwarding instead, or have 1 account automatically check and pull in email from the others, or use a mail client with support for multiple inboxes. Also remember that free services guarantee nothing. If you want support then I recommend paying for Google One so you have some recourse at the end: https://one.google.com/ https://one.google.com/
tempestn 8y ago
I enjoy the Google interface and spam filtering, but don't want to be dependent on them. So I've been transitioning to a new address on my own domain, and just auto-forward the mail from my server to gmail and reply from there (using my domain). I also download my mail via IMAP monthly so I'll have a backup in case I ever lose access. There's also a fringe benefit: I can run spam assassin on the server, set to filter out only the spammiest of spam. That cuts the quantity in gmail's spam folder down to a level I can manageably look through on occasion for false positives.
walrus01 8y ago
I strongly encourage everyone who wants to have some modicum of control over things, register your own domain and control the authoritative nameservers for it. It's fine to have route53 as an authoritative slave if you want. This lets you point the MX to another service provider rather quickly, such as in an instance where something has gone terribly wrong with your Google mail services.
- im3w1l 8y ago
  > control the authoritative nameservers for it What does this mean?
  - walrus01 8y ago
    control your own DNS. When you register a domain, your registrar asks you what you want to be the domain name servers for it. This is the same info that shows up for the namservers in a domain's WHOIS entry. If you control the nameservers you can quickly and easily do things like move the mail services elsewhere, in the event that your third-party-hosted mail services go rogue.
8to5Therapy 8y ago
This is more like user not able to read horror story
rukuu001 8y ago
Ugh, I lost my YouTube channel when I upgraded a personal address to GSuite. It wasn't a huge channel so I shrugged and got to work uploading videos again, but just so frustrating.
z92 8y ago
I run my own email server and have my mail address pasted over websites in plain text and whois records. Still I receive very few spam and not using any spam filter. Here's what I did. Fit for personal use only, not business use. * Setup DKIM signature and reject all mails that don't have one. Cut down spam 90%. * Reject mails from .info .us and other country TLDs that you don't deal with. Further cut down spam by 90%. * When I mark a first mail from a new domain as spam, the server blocks all future mails from it. That's all. Works for me.
- crtasm 8y ago
  That sounds good, I've learned how to do SPF for outgoing mail but not yet DKIM - one day! I saw a talk a few years ago on aggregating DNS lookups for insight into many things, spam included. The presenter said he had great results from simply blocking mail from domains that were less than 24hrs old.
kmfrk 8y ago
I set up e-mail forwarding for a custom address after reading stories like this. While it won't back up my e-mails (unless I get a plan that supports that), I'll still be able to redirect 2FA and contact e-mails elsewhere.
pixelmonkey 8y ago
This is probably a good moment to mention that GMail backup solutions exist. got-your-back (GYB) is an open source backup tool in Python that can be easily run as a cron job and backs up all your email. https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back Also, Google Takeout has a full MBox export of your GMail account that may be worth running annually as a paranoid extra safe backup.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  I've found it difficult to find somewhere to import an Mbox. You've gotta grab a desktop app like Thunderbird that supports it and then upload the data again. Easiest for me has been to just have any email client that supports IMAP on a desktop PC and open it occasionally so that it syncs. This saves you the Takeout delay of packaging up your mail, and ensures you're only downloading the delta since last time. I do have some Takeout snapshots though in case I ever absolutely have to go back.
  - pixelmonkey 8y ago
    The GYB script I linked actually has a restore mode that can make use of the Google Takeout MBox files.
hpcjoe 8y ago
Number 1 lesson from this: ALWAYS HAVE A BACKUP OF YOUR DATA AT A DIFFERENT PLACE ON DIFFERENT MEDIA. For google, to do this, use https://takeout.google.com/ https://takeout.google.com/ . Download a copy of your data. Now. Number 2 lesson to learn from this, which is very painful for many, is that there is a significant operational risk surface added by using cloud services, in that you may not actually have control or access to long historical records of data and metadata. Which means, despite clouds simplifying your life with respect to owning/operating/standing up your own kit/capabilities, depending upon how good/bad they are at being helpful in events like these, you massively increase operational risk by using them, as you lack control over the access to your data and history. If their policies and procedures run counter to what you need ... well ... think smelly creek, canoe, and no paddle or oar. This is on the provider, and Google's "customer service" is known to be horrible for paying customers. I had used them at $dayjob-1, and found that depite paying them ~$100/month for my companies users of Google Apps/GSuite, I could never reach a person to help with a problem. I couldn't find contact points for asking for help. They had an email alias that took a while for them to answer, and it was as bad as the half-way-around-the-world tech support call centers, but in email form. So, yeah. Back up your documents, emails, etc. Ask yourself what happens if they go away. If you are a small business person as I was, ask yourself what happens if one of your customers is late paying you, so you are late paying them. Kinda sucks to operate without your email and your documents ... Call this one of the the down sides to *aaS.
mark_l_watson 8y ago
This works for me: I have my own domain and pay for Fastmail. I do have a forward rule to send everything to gmail, and enable this rule when travelling. Google Takeout is your friend, and I periodically download copies of email, calendar data, and many other options. I got my gmail 3 years before it became public, and I appreciate having the account, but I make sure my business would continue fine if I suddenly lost the account. For backing up photos: this is easy, I set my phone to wait until I am on wifi and then save to Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Photos. Before I put the phone on wifi, I look at pictures taken that day and delete the ones I don’t want to have 3 backup copies of. For most people, photos may be their most valuable didgital asset. Worth having multiple backups.
js2 8y ago
My recollection is that Google used to have two completely different account types. There was the external @gmail.com account type, and then there was the internal @domain.com account type. The latter used an accounting system that was originally designed for internal (employee) accounts, but then became the basis of what was called "Google Apps" which I guess is now GSuite. Apparently there were (and still are?) all sorts of bizarre issues due to the fact that they originally had these two distinct account types. Anyway, I have both an @gmail.com address and my own domain, the latter of which I had with Google Apps for a while back when it was free. I remember having no end of trouble accessing various Google services when I had both account types. I eventually moved my domain away from Google (I moved email to FastMail). But one thing that broke when I moved my domain away was that my wife lost her blogger account... there was no way (at the time) to transfer everything she'd blogged to an @gmail.com account. What a terribly confusing mess. My complaint about these sorts of things is the same complaint I have whenever an Apple product breaks on me in a really stupid way: you'd hope the richest tech companies in the world could do better.
smivan 8y ago
UPDATE: https://lawgimenez.me/2018/08/07/g-suite-happy-ending/ https://lawgimenez.me/2018/08/07/g-suite-happy-ending/ Google reached out to the author and got the situation resolved.

Just like the old saying goes: “Don’t mix business and pleasure” That means not mixing corporate Gmail (or Outlook, or anything else really) with your personal email. Not using the email for your AWS account to purchase home goods on Amazons retail site. At best your have the mild convenience of a single inbox. At worst Amazon shuts down your AWS account because you open a dispute for a fake Beanie Baby purchased off the retail site.

cjhanks 8y ago
Wait what? I have heard a few horror stories about overly-harsh Amazon reviews resulting in a loss of access to AWS. But opening a dispute? Is this true?
- zatkin 8y ago
  I think what OP is getting at about w/r/t AWS can be clarified by my horror story: I once was using third party software (recommended by AWS) to upload 1 TB of data to AWS Glacier. The individual files were quite large, and if at any point during the upload the connection was lost, the third party software would start over from the beginning. I found this out after noticing that none of my backups had been uploaded after leaving it running overnight. I ended up getting charged something like $20K, which was insane! So I disputed this to Amazon, and they agreed to avoid charging me in exchange for a deletion of my account. Which was associated with my old Amazon.com account.
  - pkaye 8y ago
    Were you able to make another Amazon account after that or do they ban you entirely?
    - zatkin 8y ago
      I actually just created a new AWS account and changed the email on my Amazon account.
  - mehrdadn 8y ago
    Confused, does AWS Glacier cost $20K/TB or something? How do you get charged that much just after one night of unchecked uploading?
    - zatkin 8y ago
      The third party software was doing a mixture of writing (uploading), and reading (to verify contents had been uploaded). It was continually trying to upload a 1 GB file for well over 12 hours. It's been a long time since this happened so I don't recall the exact figures, but I remember having some 4 or 5 figure charge from AWS. I think the third party software was just bad at handling large single file uploads over residential internet.
dingo_bat 8y ago
> At best your have the mild convenience of a single inbox. Which is also not an issue if you use a decent email client. Even Win10 default Mail app supports unified inbox for multiple accounts.
gingerlime 8y ago
I would say "Don't even mix business with business with Amazon" (not very) funnily enough, we have a business AWS account that is also used for Amazon (buying stuff for the office), as well as Amazon seller central. We've set up MFA on the AWS account, but it's in total conflict with the seller central account, which keeps asking for setting up MFA as well. If we set both, we're almost totally locked-out of our AWS. Somehow the MFA device gets mixed up or something. We can kinda squeeze-in if we try a few times with alternating between codes. Seller central seems connected to the Amazon retail, but not AWS. Totally bizarre. We've contacted AWS MFA support several times, but there's basically no solution for this. They claim it's all somehow integrated, but something isn't quite well integrated as it should be.
- exikyut 8y ago
  Maybe try pinging AWS's VP, https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jeffbarr https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jeffbarr (email in bio link). My guess is that you might be the only person/company who has this specific setup, so there's either no ticket, or it has a priority of -99999. Still probably worth headscratching about internally... (If emailing works out, I'd be very interested to know!)

zatkin 8y ago

It's stories like these that reinforce my own justification for running my own email server. I would recommend you run your own email server - it's both fun (you get to set it up yourself, add any features you want), and rewarding (you don't have to worry about the "rug being swept from under your feet"). The only caveat is time - time for SMTP servers around the world to know that your mail server's IP is not sending spam - and filling out some forms to unblock the server's IP address. Since moving in 2014, I have had no hassles at all, and I continue to tweak things to my liking.

memset 8y ago
Genuine question: one reason everyone moved to Gmail is because it was so damn good at spam filtering. What do you use today? Spamassasin out of the box? Or plugins or modifications? Or something else entirely?
- dpedu 8y ago
  Not OP, but I use both Spamassassin and DSPAM. It catches most spam but I do see a couple every week.
- biktor_gj 8y ago
  At work we used Ironports for years until Cisco, as usual,started making a mess. Nowadays we use Mailcleaner with a little bit of tweaking in a VM. It's a little worse than IronPort when Ironport was good, but so much better than what Cisco's systems were doing for us when we shut the old system down. On a side note, I really don't understand why people say it's hard to run a mail server, it really isn't. It can be hard if you go full postfix+spamassasin on plain config files and configure everything without any help. Since 2005, we've been running: Exchange 2003 Exchange 2010 Exchange 2016 Watchguard smtp Proxies and antispam External provider's antispam services Cisco Ironports (first a dual node cluster with some older machines, then Cisco came and forced us to upgrade to some C170 which were slow as hell) We've run through countless updates on the exchange servers, we have mailboxes with more than 50Gb of content, about 1Tb of database sizes, the biggest problem we had, came when we had a two node DAG in Exchange 2010 and the RPC Client Access Server didn't correctly change when Outlook 2007 was open leaving some clients trying to connect to the server that was rebooting. We've also changed IP addresses a few times, but if you change your SPF records correctly, and pay for a good IP range you won't have any problems. Sure, you can't have your mail server on an IP range flagged as spam, but you also wouldn't buy a 100.000 dollar car and put 50 dollar wheels on it!

kyrra 8y ago

It's worth noting that this person posted to /r/Google[0] before writing the blog post. One thing that doesn't make any sense to me is this comment: > When I login it always redirect to my @yourdomain.com with no gmail, drive, etc. Even if I clean the browser history. I do not understand this even. So it sounds like this person can still log into their Gmail account, but it redirects to the deleted gsuite account. That definitely doesn't seem right, but it seems like the Gmail account could still be there? [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/94gl4k/gsuite_cancelled_my_subscription_now_i_cant_use/ https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/94gl4k/gsuite_cance...

Nition 8y ago
Their support ticket has some more info in subsequent posts from both them and others: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/apps/RIHSJ4LIXwE;context-place=forum/apps https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/apps/RIHSJ4LI...
- kyrra 8y ago
  Thanks. Reading that a the help docs[0] explain it better. I wonder if they can restore the business account and then do takeout on it. [0] https://support.google.com/work/mail/answer/6243136?hl=en&ref_topic=6248365 https://support.google.com/work/mail/answer/6243136?hl=en&re...

ValentineC 8y ago

I wanted to see how people were being convinced to link their Gmail accounts with a G Suite account, so I tried hunting for the option to sign up for this "Gmail for Work" service. The links keep sending me to either G Suite's standard landing page, or to admin.google.com, which only works with G Suite domains. I did find the help pages for the service: https://support.google.com/work/mail/answer/6236599 https://support.google.com/work/mail/answer/6236599

KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago

TBH this just sounds like a bug, if google support weren't so incompetent they would make this right and the story would be forgotten. But they are so this will be another black stain on Google's name.

Nition 8y ago
Someone in the support thread[1] links to an official Google page[2] where it says under 'Before you unlock additional G Suite features': > G Suite: You can continue to use your personal Gmail account. However, if you unlock additional features and then cancel business email powered by G Suite, you can't go back to using your original free Gmail address. Sounds like a terrible 'feature' though. [1] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/apps/RIHSJ4LIXwE;context-place=forum/apps https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/apps/RIHSJ4LI... [2] https://support.google.com/work/mail/answer/6243136?hl=en&ref_topic=6248365 https://support.google.com/work/mail/answer/6243136?hl=en&re...

Apocryphon 8y ago

Squeaky wheel gets the grease. The more this story is upvoted, retweeted, and spread, the likelier that Google will be forced to deal with a potential PR backlash. Customer service via viral outrage is an unfortunate consequence of these mass scale services (and companies unwilling to properly invest in human support staff to improve the quality of customer success). It's slightly similar to human flesh search engines in China [0]. Maybe there's a way to organize crowdsourced feedback whenever these tech giants fail to address particularly bad customer issues. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_flesh_search_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_flesh_search_engine

michelledepeil 8y ago
The original post is yet another example of taking to personal blogs to get proper customer support for critical services. I find this concept terrible. The eventual, theoretical end-point is that only the elite, social-media connected individuals will get help with their Gmail issues. I'm not worried about me, I'm worried about 70 year-olds who don't run blogs and don't have 40k insta followers. So yes, crowdsourcing such a thing, in a simple, clear way, would be an absolute blessing. Think Github issues but then 1000x more accessible for average consumers.
- reitanqild 8y ago
  > I find this concept terrible. The eventual, theoretical end-point is that only the elite, social-media connected individuals will get help with their Gmail issues. Another, better outcome would be if Google get tired of getting bad PR and decides to 1. remove traps like the one we are discussing and/or 2. fix their support system.

WheelsAtLarge 8y ago

And here's an example of free never really being free. It sux but when you pay nothing, expect nothing. That's really the lesson to learn. I once had a "free" website that was running for years. One day it was all gone, no notice, no warning. Lucky I backed it up. I was back in business in a few hours..

fauigerzigerk 8y ago
That's not the lession. We do pay Google enough to make billions of profits every quarter by granting them access to our data. Google's terms of service give us no guarantees at all, but neither do other consumer or small business oriented cloud services that charge real money. I seem to be one of the few people who actually read the terms of service before starting to seriously depend on a provider. Usually, you don't have any rights at all. Most services can kick out paying customers without notice, without explanation and without recourse. If you want real contractual guarantees (SLAs with penalties) you need to go all the way to enterprise services and they are extremely expensive. In my view, the pragmatic lession if you're not an enterprise customer is to choose profitable mid-size providers that are not too cheap and combine a few of them or combine with on-premises infrastructure (that is your PC :) to avoid any single point of failure.

client4 8y ago

I was banned without explanation in 2011 from Google. No calendar, no email, no phone contacts! Gone immediately and with no ability to get them back. I only regained access because of a Reddit post.

deleted 8y ago
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ramshanker 8y ago

Temporary workaround: Everyone should perform manual download of their data once each 6 month or so. https://www.wikihow.tech/Back-Up-Your-Gmail-Account https://www.wikihow.tech/Back-Up-Your-Gmail-Account

kumarvvr 8y ago
Thank you so much for this.
nhebb 8y ago
I got to step 5 > You have no services enabled for which data can be exported. What? I've had this (paid) GSuite account for years. That's a bit discouraging.
- davchana 8y ago
  You might need to check with your administrator (or if you yourself are managing it, you need to log in with admin account), there is a option somewhere there at admin.google.com to let your users export data.
  - nhebb 8y ago
    Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately, I searched the settings and can't find anything that seems related that isn't already set to ON. I'm the only user (Super Admin).
    - danielx 8y ago
      This KB article might help: https://support.google.com/a/answer/6396995?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/answer/6396995?hl=en
pandasun 8y ago
I wish I had done this in 2015. I lost the only pictures of my now deceased dog in Google Drive when I was locked out for no reason. Except I didn't regain access because I didn't make a popular Reddit or blog post. Apparently Google's "customer service" runs as follows: 1. Don't provide any customer service email address. 2. Don't provide any contact form. 3. Don't provide any phone number. 4. Don't respond when people resort to sending snail mail. (Yes really I tried and I'm not the only one). 5. Provide a forum where 999/1000 posts don't get a response. 6. Suddenly respond if it affects public relations. (ea. a popular Reddit post).

hellofunk 8y ago

I have a GSuite subscription that I’ve been thinking of canceling. I wonder if there is an obvious way to know if this could happen to me. I have emails from it’s main email address forwarded to a personal account, and probably also have the personal account setup as a concact perhaps. I will have to thoroughly read through the settings. My personal gmail account is 14 years old.

ValentineC 8y ago
If you have a paid G Suite subscription, you'll have access to their phone/email/chat support [1], and you can call them to find out if your Gmail's linked. I think the OP's problem was upgrading to G Suite via a new "Gmail for Business" option [2], which I still can't find on my personal Gmail accounts. [1] https://support.google.com/a/answer/1047213 https://support.google.com/a/answer/1047213 [2] https://support.google.com/work/mail/answer/6236599 https://support.google.com/work/mail/answer/6236599

xab9 8y ago

Question: how do you move away from gmail? Phone providers in the last decade came up with number transfers (I can talk about Europe only), but how do I transfer my gmail.com address? I have hundreds of registrations tied to my gmail (been using it since it was available, more than a decade now), some are for my bank, others are for webshops, countrywide tax management system, ebay, amazon, healthcare, friends etc. I read how people are not relying on gmail and running their own servers, but how do they do it? How do they cut loose the ties with their past?

TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
This is what I've done: sync your Gmail account with a regular mail client and backup the mail clients database so as not to lose any old emails. Step two create new email address with dedicated email provider, one known to have good customer support. Step three, stop giving out your Gmail address, and over time update your email address on all the services you use. You can't take your @gmail.com address with you to a different provider, I think that would break the way the Internet works.
- giancarlostoro 8y ago
  Another option is to get a personal domain where the dedicated email provider can support. If you own the domain to your email, you can switch providers more seamlessly, of course you gotta back up your emails through a third party client. Maybe a third party web client you can host yourself that stores your emails. Maybe something like Mailpile: https://www.mailpile.is/ https://www.mailpile.is/
  - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
    Oh yeah, I should have mentioned I registered two domains. One is my firstnamelastname.com and the other is k45j.com so I use a364@k45j.com because it’s short and unambiguous to say over the phone.
- keypusher 8y ago
  You can have gmail forward everything to the new address.

marcus_holmes 8y ago

Google's nightmare-bad UI strikes again.

viach 8y ago

Imagine having online exchange auth to be based on the lost email. Indeed, a horror story.

Havoc 8y ago
Had that with a bank & phone number I lost. Guess who got a OTP via snail mail lol

rkagerer 8y ago

Sorry to hear about your woes. Google should be ashamed and embarrassed that they still haven't fixed this. I ran into a similar problem years ago after they acquired Postini and forced us all to migrate. GSuite was called Google Apps at the time, and it cannibalized my personal email (which originally used my own domain, not GMail). Despite numerous contacts with various support channels and even nagging dev googlers at I/O about it I never managed to get it properly severed again. Wound up losing all my history from a lot of Google services linked to the original account. Doesn't help there's also a bug in the Google Play / Android setup wizard where it refuses to recognize the me%olddomain.com@gtempaccount addresses (thinks % is invalid), presenting another impediment to trying to manually extract stuff. Shame Google, shame!

deleted 8y ago
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ddtaylor 8y ago
The lesson I learned a long time ago is Google products are great until you need to contact someone. I'm sure a few people have some ability to directly contact a real person at the company, but 99% of us are stuck with their product support forums that OP linked to, which frankly are terrible and rarely solve any real problems - I would highly doubt if any of their "representatives" can actually do anything but show you existing help documents.
- e40 8y ago
  Calling the product support forums terrible is being way too kind. They are worse than terrible because they give you hope. I've used them dozens of times over the years, and never once has a solution come from them.
  - stoolpigeon 8y ago
    Yes. When they turn up in my search results for an issue it always makes me sad because the threads never have useful resolution.

scarejunba 8y ago

Holy shit! This is a _terrible_ user experience. What an absolute nightmare. I can't imagine some PM saw this and decided to okay it. Wow. The only reason I can guess that it didn't pop up sooner is that no one uses this product.

freakynit 8y ago

Companies these days spend like maniacs on UI, but can't even get the basic UX right.

Animats 8y ago

Always remember, with Google, you're not the customer, you're the product. As such, you have no power to demand anything.

dingo_bat 8y ago
One would think that applies to the free users, not the paying customers.

SpaceManNabs 8y ago

Am I in a position to be susceptible to this? My personal Gmail is used for my data science/dota blog hosted on Google App Engine. I am using the free quota stuff. I don't think I upgraded to business or anything. So scary :(

z3t4 8y ago

Even if you store the data in the "cloud", you should still make backups! If the service doesn't allow you to make backups, then use another service! If the data is important, you should have backups! I know how boring backups are, but it can be fully automated. (if the data is very important you also want offline backups though) Just don't forget to test the backups at regular intervals, to see if it's possible to recover from a backup.

8ytecoder 8y ago

Mail: personal domain with GSuite backed up by IMAP every day Contacts: backup on multiple devices Drive: full data on at least one hard drive at all times Photos: use via Google drive instead of Google photos directly. That allows you to backup like any other data. All of this must then be backed up off of the hard disk. Our lives are all digital these days. Memories, financial documents, important addresses and phone numbers - everything is digital. Treat it like you'd treat anything valuable. Also, don't assume something catastrophic. Something as simple as a stolen credit card that you forgot to update in one service is enough to lock you out. Or a bug.

remusrm 8y ago
How about incoming email and other functions?
exikyut 8y ago
Wait, Google Photos doesn't allow backup? I had no idea. Nice.
- izacus 8y ago
  I think you misunderstood something. You can export all your photos via Takeout... or flip a switch that makes them appear in your Drive to use more convenient sync tools.
  - ValentineC 8y ago
    Nice, it looks like they finally enabled the option [1] for G Suite users [2]. It wasn't available before [3]. [1] https://support.google.com/drive/answer/6156103 https://support.google.com/drive/answer/6156103 [2] https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2017/12/changing-how-you-view-photos-and-videos.html https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2017/12/changing-how-yo... [3] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/photos/hMeOfq0QsWU;context-place=topicsearchin/photos/category$3Amanaging-photos-and-videos https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/photos/hMeOfq...

bmarquez 8y ago

This is scary. I rely on a legacy free G Suite account, so if paying users have problems, I'd definitely be screwed. In general I've found it difficult to get a hold of a live human at Google. The one time I was successful was after buying a Google Nexus phone and requesting hardware support (I think it was through the customer support/returns line.) In contrast, I recently had issues with my iCloud account and was able to get live telephone support. It took 3 hours on hold and being passed through different departments, but I was impressed that Apple actually solved the problem while I was on the line. Didn't spend a penny on iCloud (directly) either.

dirtylowprofile 8y ago

Thank you for the response guys, I am still halfway reading the comments. I hope this problems gets to the guys at Google, I really wanted to recover my personal Gmail account before Google completely wipes it out from their server. Right now, I am on @icloud.com and since Apple is easy to migrate from one device to another I believe this is a nice fresh start. In the future maybe I will try Protonmail but since it requires a "bridge" for paid accounts, maybe I will look into it in the near future.

mamborambo 8y ago

Scary shit here! I just finished the gsuite trial period and started my first paid month, and then to read this horror story is.... I activated Gsuite because it is the best price/capacity value for cloud storage (at the moment) and also I want to evaluate this product as reselling my IT services. I am not going to be happy if I cannot move back into my free gmail in the futue. Google, we need a good response from you.

manigandham 8y ago

Never combine accounts, especially across different service levels. Personal GMail + GSuite is asking for trouble, simply because they are different products aimed at different customers with their own teams and support. Trying to detangle accounts after will never go well. Just setup forwarding instead, or have 1 account automatically check and pull in email from the others, or use a mail client with support for multiple inboxes. Also remember that free services guarantee nothing. If you want support then I recommend paying for Google One so you have some recourse at the end: https://one.google.com/ https://one.google.com/

tempestn 8y ago

I enjoy the Google interface and spam filtering, but don't want to be dependent on them. So I've been transitioning to a new address on my own domain, and just auto-forward the mail from my server to gmail and reply from there (using my domain). I also download my mail via IMAP monthly so I'll have a backup in case I ever lose access. There's also a fringe benefit: I can run spam assassin on the server, set to filter out only the spammiest of spam. That cuts the quantity in gmail's spam folder down to a level I can manageably look through on occasion for false positives.

walrus01 8y ago

I strongly encourage everyone who wants to have some modicum of control over things, register your own domain and control the authoritative nameservers for it. It's fine to have route53 as an authoritative slave if you want. This lets you point the MX to another service provider rather quickly, such as in an instance where something has gone terribly wrong with your Google mail services.

im3w1l 8y ago
> control the authoritative nameservers for it What does this mean?
- walrus01 8y ago
  control your own DNS. When you register a domain, your registrar asks you what you want to be the domain name servers for it. This is the same info that shows up for the namservers in a domain's WHOIS entry. If you control the nameservers you can quickly and easily do things like move the mail services elsewhere, in the event that your third-party-hosted mail services go rogue.

8to5Therapy 8y ago

This is more like user not able to read horror story

rukuu001 8y ago

Ugh, I lost my YouTube channel when I upgraded a personal address to GSuite. It wasn't a huge channel so I shrugged and got to work uploading videos again, but just so frustrating.

z92 8y ago

I run my own email server and have my mail address pasted over websites in plain text and whois records. Still I receive very few spam and not using any spam filter. Here's what I did. Fit for personal use only, not business use. * Setup DKIM signature and reject all mails that don't have one. Cut down spam 90%. * Reject mails from .info .us and other country TLDs that you don't deal with. Further cut down spam by 90%. * When I mark a first mail from a new domain as spam, the server blocks all future mails from it. That's all. Works for me.

crtasm 8y ago
That sounds good, I've learned how to do SPF for outgoing mail but not yet DKIM - one day! I saw a talk a few years ago on aggregating DNS lookups for insight into many things, spam included. The presenter said he had great results from simply blocking mail from domains that were less than 24hrs old.

kmfrk 8y ago

I set up e-mail forwarding for a custom address after reading stories like this. While it won't back up my e-mails (unless I get a plan that supports that), I'll still be able to redirect 2FA and contact e-mails elsewhere.

pixelmonkey 8y ago

This is probably a good moment to mention that GMail backup solutions exist. got-your-back (GYB) is an open source backup tool in Python that can be easily run as a cron job and backs up all your email. https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back https://github.com/jay0lee/got-your-back Also, Google Takeout has a full MBox export of your GMail account that may be worth running annually as a paranoid extra safe backup.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
I've found it difficult to find somewhere to import an Mbox. You've gotta grab a desktop app like Thunderbird that supports it and then upload the data again. Easiest for me has been to just have any email client that supports IMAP on a desktop PC and open it occasionally so that it syncs. This saves you the Takeout delay of packaging up your mail, and ensures you're only downloading the delta since last time. I do have some Takeout snapshots though in case I ever absolutely have to go back.
- pixelmonkey 8y ago
  The GYB script I linked actually has a restore mode that can make use of the Google Takeout MBox files.

hpcjoe 8y ago

Number 1 lesson from this: ALWAYS HAVE A BACKUP OF YOUR DATA AT A DIFFERENT PLACE ON DIFFERENT MEDIA. For google, to do this, use https://takeout.google.com/ https://takeout.google.com/ . Download a copy of your data. Now. Number 2 lesson to learn from this, which is very painful for many, is that there is a significant operational risk surface added by using cloud services, in that you may not actually have control or access to long historical records of data and metadata. Which means, despite clouds simplifying your life with respect to owning/operating/standing up your own kit/capabilities, depending upon how good/bad they are at being helpful in events like these, you massively increase operational risk by using them, as you lack control over the access to your data and history. If their policies and procedures run counter to what you need ... well ... think smelly creek, canoe, and no paddle or oar. This is on the provider, and Google's "customer service" is known to be horrible for paying customers. I had used them at $dayjob-1, and found that depite paying them ~$100/month for my companies users of Google Apps/GSuite, I could never reach a person to help with a problem. I couldn't find contact points for asking for help. They had an email alias that took a while for them to answer, and it was as bad as the half-way-around-the-world tech support call centers, but in email form. So, yeah. Back up your documents, emails, etc. Ask yourself what happens if they go away. If you are a small business person as I was, ask yourself what happens if one of your customers is late paying you, so you are late paying them. Kinda sucks to operate without your email and your documents ... Call this one of the the down sides to *aaS.

mark_l_watson 8y ago

This works for me: I have my own domain and pay for Fastmail. I do have a forward rule to send everything to gmail, and enable this rule when travelling. Google Takeout is your friend, and I periodically download copies of email, calendar data, and many other options. I got my gmail 3 years before it became public, and I appreciate having the account, but I make sure my business would continue fine if I suddenly lost the account. For backing up photos: this is easy, I set my phone to wait until I am on wifi and then save to Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Photos. Before I put the phone on wifi, I look at pictures taken that day and delete the ones I don’t want to have 3 backup copies of. For most people, photos may be their most valuable didgital asset. Worth having multiple backups.

js2 8y ago

My recollection is that Google used to have two completely different account types. There was the external @gmail.com account type, and then there was the internal @domain.com account type. The latter used an accounting system that was originally designed for internal (employee) accounts, but then became the basis of what was called "Google Apps" which I guess is now GSuite. Apparently there were (and still are?) all sorts of bizarre issues due to the fact that they originally had these two distinct account types. Anyway, I have both an @gmail.com address and my own domain, the latter of which I had with Google Apps for a while back when it was free. I remember having no end of trouble accessing various Google services when I had both account types. I eventually moved my domain away from Google (I moved email to FastMail). But one thing that broke when I moved my domain away was that my wife lost her blogger account... there was no way (at the time) to transfer everything she'd blogged to an @gmail.com account. What a terribly confusing mess. My complaint about these sorts of things is the same complaint I have whenever an Apple product breaks on me in a really stupid way: you'd hope the richest tech companies in the world could do better.

smivan 8y ago

UPDATE: https://lawgimenez.me/2018/08/07/g-suite-happy-ending/ https://lawgimenez.me/2018/08/07/g-suite-happy-ending/ Google reached out to the author and got the situation resolved.