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Tell HN: Locked Google account reopened after two years

• sumijan01 3y ago
  [flagged]
• sumijan01 3y ago
  [flagged]
• IYasha 3y ago
  Unbelievable! As a gmail victim myself I'm very happy for you. I don't know if that's an unfortunate coincidence, but I seem to have been banned from google the same day. :) I didn't know you can actually be banned from google! (and I haven't even been there for a month or two) 403. That’s an error. Your client does not have permission to get URL / from this server. That’s all we know.
• ggm 3y ago
  Have you now enabled 2fa and recovery codes?
  • romanhn 3y ago
    Immediately!
    • ggm 3y ago
      You made me go and check mine! I mean I know I had them but it always pays to remember. And.. I found out that the "what was your mothers atomic weight in molar equivalent pure technetium" check question was deprecated 2 years ago and they will no longer ask you how a Giraffe whistles, if you want to get back into the account. I deleted the question.
• crazysim 3y ago
  Google Takeout now!
  • buildbot 3y ago
    If it works…
• valleyer 3y ago
  Why not download the mail and keep it locally, instead of accessing it only on the whims of Google security EPMs? A standard IMAP client will do this for you easily.
  • ipqk 3y ago
    I do a Pop3 sync of all my email from gmail about once a month. It's not a perfect 1-to-1 mapping, but if I ever get locked out, only lose about a months worth of mail.
  • romanhn 3y ago
    Good point. I had done this previously with my primary email, but it didn't occur to do the same here for some reason. I kicked off the Google Takeout process per another comment's suggestion.
  • abdullahkhalids 3y ago
    One should do that for all email addresses, even ones that one uses daily. You never know when you will be screwed over by your provider.
    • netsharc 3y ago
      I got Yahoo! Mail in the 90's (when they started offering email, the world was so different and I thought a @yahoo.com address was a must have). A few years ago I thought I'd look at emails from my teenage years, and guess what, Yahoo silently lost all my emails before the year 2000/2001. If only I can find that 20GB IDE disk with all the data I've migrated since my first computer...
      • romanhn 3y ago
        I'd suggest looking again - they might have lost the rest by now if you haven't been using it. They now delete all email if you haven't logged in for a year. I found out first-hand :(
        • 3y ago
• ncann 3y ago
  It's funny, I have an old Gmail account that I haven't logged in in years. That account had my current account listed as a recovery email. One day I received an email to my current account from Google saying that it had blocked a suspicious attempt to log in to that old account. So I tried to log in to that old account to change the password but Google wouldn't let me, just saying something like somethings seemed wrong with your login attempt. There was no recovery option available. So despite having the correct password AND having access to the recovery email, I'm still locked out of that old account today. Maybe I'll give it a try later today though.
  • LightHugger 3y ago
    Seemingly without notifying us, google has turned off recovering accounts using the recovery email. Since a few years back they will only ever except phone numbers for this. It's unbelievably stupid.
    • atomicfiredoll 3y ago
      Is this what's going on? I have an account with a maiden name I check now and then. I tried to get into it when they announced the policy change around inactive accounts, but was presented with an error saying I had no recovery information. I swore there was a recovery email and could see the security alerts being forwarded to other accounts, but can't do anything. With so many people centralizing on gmail over the years, this really feels like another blow to the usefulness of email overall. It has me thinking more critically around recovery workflows I've built or assumptions that people will have records of previously sent messages.
    • mdekkers 3y ago
      > It's unbelievably stupid. In other words, they now force you to give them your phone number, which is incredibly valuable to them. It’s unbelievably smart on their part.
      • jlokier 3y ago
        It's not smart if you can't given them your phone number because they started requiring your phone number to login before you can give them your phone number.
• swozey 3y ago
  Two years ago I used just about everything Google and had done so since Gmail first came out. My Android phone was googlefi. Internet was google. Gmail. DNS. SSO to pretty much everything. One day out of the blue my Google Pay account was marked as fraud and locked down. I couldn't update/add/change any of my payment information. I have no idea why. I don't remember when/how I even found out it was locked down, I wasn't really sure at that point what stopped working, if anything. I didn't have anything TELL me that it wasn't working so I thought this was just an isolated event that would get resolved quickly and wasn't affecting anything important. Then throughout that week I started to notice what wasn't working. I could log into gmail (IIRC) but I wasn't getting any email. My custom domains that forwarded to gmail stopped resolving. My cell phone wouldn't make calls anymore. I never had a problem with SSO logins, thankfully. The credit card I was using for all of my Google services was coming up on its expiration and I desperately needed my 15+ year old gmail to work. I'm pretty sure I was in the middle of selling a house when this was going on. I have so much mail in the inbox that it won't accept mail without paying for the service. Google has this form you fill out and attach a picture of your drivers license to so that they can investigate the "fraud." Over that month I sent in my DL at least 3 times. I never received any response. I was without a phone for a week because they had no customer service to even speak to, not that I could even make any outbound calls. I wound up getting another phone plan elsewhere because that was the most critical thing to me. I was so pissed at Google I switched to an iPhone. I was getting no response from Google and days/weeks were going by so finally I bit the bullet and de-googled everything I could. I migrated all of my 15 years of email to Fastmail. I moved all of my DNS records. Changed my ISP. It was infuriating. It's been about 2 years since I did that, I've still never heard from Google about anything. But now all of my accounts are unlocked. I will never, ever trust my important accounts to Google again.
  • terrycody 3y ago
    >But now all of my accounts are unlocked. But your accounts are unlocked isn't it?
  • akg_67 3y ago
    Lesson here is to not put all your eggs in one basket. I try to make sure there is no one vendor service that can become mission critical in my life, specially not likes of Google/Amazon/Microsoft/Apple.
• mustardboy 3y ago
  Wow! Thanks for the post. I was able to login to my locked account as well. Been waiting ten years for this.
• kjs3 3y ago
  Wow...how many GB of spam is in there?
  • romanhn 3y ago
    I never used this address anywhere so comparatively not much. Oddly, almost none of it is in the spam folder. The other interesting bit is that someone seems to have been using this address for online purchases and lease agreements (fraudulently, most likely).
    • sowbug 3y ago
      I have a very old Gmail account. For purposes of this discussion, call it sergey@gmail.com. I often get real email sent to addresses like sergey2000@gmail.com. By "real" I mean important stuff that people would miss if they didn't receive it. In the beginning, I used to follow up. I'd occasionally get a reply from the sender asking a question like "OK, thanks, could you send it to her for me?" I concluded that some people have a "horseshoes and hand grenades" attitude toward email addresses -- close but not exact is good enough. Maybe they can't remember all the digits in the address, so they put what they can remember and hit send.
      • dwaite 3y ago
        Similar situation, but I've had people think I'm "hacking" them when I respond. As a result, within the last 15 years I have only contacted someone back once. That was about funeral dates/coordination.
• anjel 3y ago
  I too will never entrust Google for email again. I'm a product, I get it, but still, it sure smells like there's a class action in this some day, under a conducive federal, shall we call it "ambiance."
• kajecounterhack 3y ago
  Google takeout is already amazing (especially compared to other companies that offer similar services) but I wish I could incrementally download whatever changed since my last backup. The amount of my data they have is huge, and I'm basically only taking a snapshot once every 6 months at this point. I have to download ~15 50gb files :( (It's almost all from YouTube, Gmail, and Google Photos)
  • justinclift 3y ago
    There are many reports of it not working, with no recourse. :(
  • buildbot 3y ago
    It is extremely not amazing, it continually fails to export my 12tb account. Which is a problem, because in 30 days or so they are going to start enforcing the 5tb limit on workspace accounts, which will prevent me from getting even emails.
    • brokenmachine 3y ago
      Can you break it up into different products on each export?
      • buildbot 3y ago
        Still fails
    • kajecounterhack 3y ago
      Yikes, thanks for letting me know this is what will happen when my data gets that big.
  • crazysim 3y ago
    I built a toolkit to rapidly backup takeout archives every 2 months and make it a bit easier to do so. I hover around the ~1.5TB range. Of course, there are catches. But maybe it might work for the non-six month archives. https://github.com/nelsonjchen/gtr https://github.com/nelsonjchen/gtr
• 037 3y ago
  I recently decided to trust Apple with my emails after witnessing a friend lose access to his free account due to some mistakes on his part. After he reached out to Apple's customer service, I was genuinely impressed by the helpful and knowledgeable support team. They escalated the issue efficiently through multiple levels, involving several phone calls over a short span of one or two days. What stood out the most was their unwavering dedication to resolving his issue, despite him only utilizing a free 5Gb account. Maybe hardware investments marks you as paying customer? Knowing that if an issue arises there'll be a team of humans eager to help is quite reassuring. [Another feature I value is Apple's "Hide My Email" (unique to paid accounts). While other services offer similar redirect/disposable email, Apple uses its @icloud.com domain, so the services you subscribe can't just ban the domain, they have to accept it]. My only issue with iCloud these days is the excessive amount of legitimate emails ending up in the spam folder, but I've noticed this problem persistently with Gmail as well. Full disclosure: I am not the CEO of Apple, just a (mostly) satisfied customer.
  • philliphaydon 3y ago
    [dead]
  • dwaite 3y ago
    I remember a boss telling me about his personal experience at Nordstroms, with a lady irate about a set of defective tires she bought. She didn't have a receipt, but the sales clerk said that he was fine with taking them as a return if she could say how much she spent on them. It's worth noting for people who are unfamiliar with the store - while they do sell some home goods in addition to clothing and beauty/jewelry, they do not sell tires. When asked afterward, the clerk said he did not know/recognize the woman. Some companies just recognize how vital points of contact are with people and try to empower their employees to help customers and more generally people, because they consider it a priority to maintain a positive perception. AppleCare support has historically tended to be very open, covering phone/online technical support for all of your Apple devices and services if any of them are actively covered. There are certainly parts of interactions with Apple that _are_ frustrating, such as certain classes of device repairs where they gate the ability to e.g. get a battery replacement based on the results from a diagnostic tool. Employees and even managers appear to have very limited capability to override those processes, presumably because you could otherwise ask for a battery replacement for a devices with a damaged screen and back panel, and pay an order of magnitude less than a repair on the damaged display and back.
• codedokode 3y ago
  > during the recovery process got asked for a phone number. Do you mean a phone number entered during registration, or an arbitrary phone number?
  • romanhn 3y ago
    I can only assume arbitrary as it sure wasn't aware of a tie to my number during previous recovery attempts. I assumed there was a required phone field somewhere that I needed to provide data for.
• tempestn 3y ago
  You refer to it as a "backup account", but it doesn't sound like a backup if it was the only place those messages were stored. I use gmail as my primary email client, and use both a gmail.com address and several of my own domains. But I regularly sync everything to a local email client (Thunderbird), so that even if Google cut me off, I would have access to all but my most recent emails, and to all my contacts.
• roflmaostc 3y ago
  Puh, I'm (EU based) so happy that I use pay mail services such as Posteo, Mailbox or Protonmail. You essentially pay 1€ per month, I get full privacy and I can adjust the level of security, ... I don't have a recovery option since I know that I don't loose my password and no one else would guess it.
• Springtime 3y ago
  If they are doing this intentionally then it's possibly because they announced they'd be deleting inactive accounts beginning from this month so perhaps they're giving some another chance. It's actually ridiculous the byzantine methods sometimes required to regain access to Google accounts. To even have a chance in such cases—even when a recovery email has already been configured—one has to use the exact browser version number that has been previously logged into (how many users would even note this), same geographic area even if different IP (obvious), and importantly if prompted for a phone number not to use one that has been used on 2-3 other accounts (even if only used to login and not entered as the recovery or 2FA number). The last straw that prompted me to leave them was when they began asking for a home address. Just voluntarily after successful logins and not part of any forced login or security requirement. The audacity that they expect users will just give it to them was so offputting, apart from everything else they try.
  • romanhn 3y ago
    Oh wow, I did not know about the upcoming policy to start deleting accounts with two years of inactivity. Thanks for mentioning this! So glad I got through ahead of it. How many people will not...
• wly_cdgr 3y ago
  Please tell me you are not gonna keep using the account. That would be too pathetic to bear.
• IOT_Apprentice 3y ago
  Reading this I wonder if there is a process to take control of my domain associated with my gdrive account so that I have control of it from the standpoint of access, registration. What happens if google locks you out if your domain?
  • icebraining 3y ago
    Did you buy it through Google Domains? I think you can migrate it to some other service without affecting the gdrive account.