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How I lost access to my Google account today

272 points by ehsanakhgari 14y ago

rollypolly 14y ago
User since 2004. Wow. Is there a way to export tens of thousands of emails from Gmail?
- thought_alarm 14y ago
  The OS X Mail.app does an excellent job of backing up your Gmail account using the standard POP3 and IMAP protocols. Every email I've received in the last eight years is stored on my MacBook, indexed in Spotlight, backed up in Time Machine, and available for offline reading whenever I need it. If my Gmail account was suspended tomorrow it would be a nuisance, but I would not lose any data and could recover from it quickly enough.
- skeletonjelly 14y ago
  Well, there's IMAP and POP. That should do the trick.
- uptown 14y ago
  This guide show you how: http://helpdeskgeek.com/how-to/export-all-email-from-gmail/ http://helpdeskgeek.com/how-to/export-all-email-from-gmail/
  - DarkShikari 14y ago
    I tried this, but Thunderbird simply locked up due to the sheer volume of emails (I subscribe to LKML and other high-volume mailing lists). I haven't been able to find any good backup solution anywhere, and articles like this really scare me.
    - cfinke 14y ago
      Thunderbird 11 is much better than Thunderbird 3.x was at handling a GMail backup. I've just finished backing up ~120,000 messages using Thunderbird 11 (archiving them into monthly folders about once an hour during the backup), and it's doing fine. (I tried the same thing a year ago with Thunderbird and gave up after 45 minutes.)
      - aDemoUzer 14y ago
        good to hear. I had tried THunderbird in the past but it would just crash. Just started today for first time in a year and just upgraded from V7 to v11. Working good so far.
    - ef4 14y ago
      Try getmail. I've used it to suck down a very large amount of mail.
      - stock_toaster 14y ago
        I prefer fdm[1], but I agree that cli mail fetch tools are great for this. [1]: http://fdm.sourceforge.net/ http://fdm.sourceforge.net/
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- gkanai 14y ago
  http://www.dataliberation.org/ http://www.dataliberation.org/
- octopus 14y ago
  Yes, any email client will make a local copy of your Google emails. If you use multiple operating systems, or you want to use a high quality open source client, best choice is Thunderbird (this is what I use). On Windows the default email client is Outlook. On Mac, iPhone, iPad the default email client is named Mail. All of the above email clients will save your emails from Gmail on your HDD.
- Jach 14y ago
  I used getmail: http://datalinkcontrol.net/dlc/content/gmail-backup-getmail http://datalinkcontrol.net/dlc/content/gmail-backup-getmail (Leave out the password from the config to be prompted when you run getmail.)
- akulbe 14y ago
  If you're on a Mac, DEVONthink Pro Office has an option to import email into a database. The archive option in DEVONthink keeps all the attachments and everything, and you can easily search for an open an email, and it will open in your local mail client. I've found it very helpful.
RexRollman 14y ago
This is one of the things that makes me worry about using Google for email. When it works, which is almost all of the time, it works great, but when there are problems, it is difficult to get assistance.
- thezilch 14y ago
  Shouldn't this worry you about ANY email service; even those that you are 100% in control? Backup important data to separate services; have separate services to read this data; do it often, including the read -- make sure your backups work.
  - machrider 14y ago
    Yes, but the specific problem with Google is they have practically zero customer support. There is no one you can call to get help, and they apparently feel no obligation to respond to problems in a timely fashion.
    - Drbble 14y ago
      If a 100K people, an insanely huge number, experienced crippling Gmail failure, that is roughly a 0.1% chance that it would affect you on your lifetime. Avoiding Gmail for this is like avoiding planes and cars and houses because you saw on the news that one blew up somewhere.
  - terinjokes 14y ago
    Haven't checked my backups in probably a year or more. Still going strong, and still readable. Thanks for the reminder. For everyone else, I'm using backupify.com to backup my Gmail and Google Contacts (and sent tweets, for some reason…)
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- krelian 14y ago
  >but when there are problems, it is difficult to get assistance. It's not only email. I got my adwords account banned in a ridiculous manner (got banned out of the blue 18 months after a supposed offense), the email replies were so generic and unhelpful (and obviously not written by a native English speaker), it was really infuriating. Fortunately for Google they can do without my $200 yearly spending on adwords.
loverobots 14y ago
Congrats on making it to page one, your account will be restored within hours. Many have their adsense and Adwords linked to suspended Gmail accounts too. It can cripple their business.
- rooshdi 14y ago
  Yea, unfortunately not everybody has the good fortune of making it to the top of HN. I had a personal Gmail account wrongfully disabled over a year ago, and after filling out every form I could find and not receiving any helpful feedback for a year, I just gave up and decided to cut my losses. However, after reading this article I checked to see if it was still disabled and, lo and behold, I was logged in! I still don't know whether to be happy or pissed, but at least it works for now.
credo 14y ago
OP says >>We've all (yours truly included) heard about the importance of owning your digital data, the downsides of vendor lock-in, and how if you're being provided a free service, you're the product, not the customer. But I honestly never understood how deep this problem is, and how severe the consequences can be ("surely this cannot happen to me", right?!). Excellent point. Btw one easy way to maintain a local copy of all your gmail-emails is to use a mail client (like Outlook or Apple Mail) with gmail. With Outlook, for example, you can easily download and move emails into a PST/OST file on your PC.
- larrys 14y ago
  "one easy way to maintain a local copy" The other way is to maintain a non local copy by setting up a forward to another email account elsewhere. That's automatic and doesn't require downloading to your local machine and happens in real time.
- wvenable 14y ago
  Backing up is fine, but the problem is you still don't own your identity. If your email address is xxx@gmail.com you've lost that forever and that could be a big problem.
  - Drbble 14y ago
    That's a problem anywhere. You have to own your own name or share it with someone you trust for life or just adapt to change like we did before cell phone number portability.
  - kaybe 14y ago
    As long as you still have your adress book you can set up a new account and tell everyone. If you have that adress book, that is.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - drucken 14y ago
    Set up your own domain name for $5/year or less and use the free email aliasing that comes with it, e.g. paul@wvenable.me would be aliased to paulharris@gmail.com at your DNS provider. Then you only ever pass around wvenable.me addresses. If you get a good provider, they will give you unlimited free aliasing (though they may not allow catch-all address for free, which redirect anything@ to some default address, due to spam potential). Combined with monthly backups via IMAP or export from your actual email providers, you will never be dependent in either identity, contacts or content with any single provider. Needless to say, all of the above is trivial to setup for a typical HN'er.
macspoofing 14y ago
I had my google account suspended for a few hours a few months back. Why? Because, I was sending myself a set of icons, and I carelessly dragged the folder in, which caused each one to upload separately (30 altogether). I noticed it quickly enough, and closed the tab. When I went back in, my account was suspended. No recourse. Nobody to talk to. Nobody to complain to. Honestly, I'd rather just pay a monthly fee for the damn thing if it meant a unilateral action such as an account suspension wouldn't happen without prior warning. I'm serious Google. It's a good service. Take my money.
- vibrunazo 14y ago
  I rely on google so much, I would certainly pay for support if the option was available.
  - ra 14y ago
    Isn't that what Google apps for business offers? I don't know if you can port an @gmail.com email address in, but if you have your own domain for $5 / user / month you get phone + email support.
    - patricklynch 14y ago
      Yes it is. The SLA is 99.9% uptime until you do something against their terms of service, but even then you'll still have somebody call and complain to. Also, I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure it's standard to set it up on your own domain and forward data from any gmail.com addresses you care about.
    - Figs 14y ago
      I tried to use their service to do that recently since I do like the GMail interface, but I couldn't create an account. The domain name had apparently already been used with them by a previous owner. There was no obvious way to fix it other than to kick someone else out of their gmail (as far as I could tell -- I'm not sure what exactly would be reset in the process), and no way to contact customer service unless you already had an account. Since I couldn't safely create an account without talking to customer support, and couldn't talk to customer support unless I created an account I was stuck in a catch-22. By that point, I realized that I don't want to deal with yet another god-damned unsupported Google product and made other arrangements. Hell, I would have been willing to pay $5/mo at the time too -- it'd be a lot easier than what I had to go through to get my mail working. Maybe their support is fantastic once you get an account working; I don't know -- I couldn't get that far to find out.
jrockway 14y ago
Just out of curiosity, did you use two factor authentication on the account? I understand that a common reason for accounts becoming disabled is because someone guessed the password, logged in, and then sent a bunch of spam (or something similarly evil). Two-step authentication makes this attack significantly more difficult. (But, of course, it makes your email harder to use. And malware can still steal your "remember this computer for 30 days" cookie.)
- ehsanakhgari 14y ago
  No, I was not using the two factor authentication feature. I still don't know what caused this, but yeah, my account might have been hacked.
frankydp 14y ago
https://www.backupify.com/ https://www.backupify.com/ GApps backup 36 bucks a user a year.
motti_s 14y ago
This happened to me once and it took a while until they reinstated my account. To date I have no idea why it happened. I thought about moving to another service, but unless you setup your own SMTP server (probably not a good idea), you never really have full control. Here is what I recommend you do (before getting locked out): 1. Use your own domain for email and host it on gmail (free) - do not use yourname@gmail.com, but yourname@yourdomain.com. 2. Create a secondary email account and have your primary account forward all emails to it. If you get locked out, your account still accepts emails. I believe that forwarding still works as well, though I haven't been able to verify it (need to get locked out again...). Then either respond from your secondary account, or change your mx records to point to another service, or even to your own temporary SMTP server. It's not a complete / ideal solution. You still don't have access to emails you sent (could be done using IMAP, but I didn't bother) and to other Google services. But it might be OK as a temporary solution until you get your account back.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- kijin 14y ago
  Some paid services have a feature that forwards a copy of all of your sent messages to another address in real time. They do this by adding a BCC to every sent message. This allows you to have copies of every single message, both sent and received.
- ajross 14y ago
  Why is setting up your own mail server a bad idea? I've been running my own for 13 years now (plain old postfix and dovecot on whatever linux distro I favor at the time). It works great.
  - motti_s 14y ago
    I agree, it's not necessarily a bad idea. I meant that most people (even most hackers) probably won't do it. I think the biggest issue is reliability, since if your SMTP server is down emails sent to you are rejected.
overgard 14y ago
Somewhat of a sidenote, but this is why I refuse to use google+: my gmail account is too important to me to risk of linking it to another google service. Especially considering the stories of people's entire google accounts getting shutdown randomly because of an "algorithm" or whatever. I like the products google makes, but their complete refusal to have any sort of customer service makes me hesitant to rely on them for anything beyond what I trust them with now.
- ajross 14y ago
  "The stories" are sort of an exaggeration. My memory is that Google did that (disabling a gmail account while freezing a google+ account) once, apparently by mistake, and corrected it within something like 48 hours. Are there other examples I've forgotten?
  - losvedir 14y ago
    Well there was that kid who lost access to his gmail account once he put his real birthday into G+.
    - Drbble 14y ago
      Because he was underage and it was illegal for Google to serve him email?
      - pyre 14y ago
        I don't think that it's technically illegal to serve email to someone under 13 years of age. That's just the conservative take on the law that most sites have taken. [You may be able to allow < 13 year olds with parent's permission, but most sites probably feel that it's too much effort/risk to do that.]
  - Steko 14y ago
    Linked article? Other people in this thread?
  - 14y ago
loverobots 14y ago
My advice for those that have other Google services tied to an email account: do not use that account to send email. You minimize the odds of getting banned and frozen out of a lot of things
kevinchen 14y ago
The site went down. Cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=cache:http://ehsanakhgari.org/blog/2012-04-14/how-i-lost-access-my-google-account-today&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=safari&#...
suyash 14y ago
Thanks for such an eye opener!! Good luck gettings yours back, I'm going to back up mine this weekend!
nextparadigms 14y ago
So is there anything he did that caused this? Or did it just happen completely random?
- zxy 14y ago
  Considering the post is titled "How I lost access to my Google account today," there is a lack of how. It's well known that your data should be redundant, this is one of those 'I didn't make a backup' posts.
read_wharf 14y ago
Don't put your stuff in there, because they are not going to treat it with the same importance that you do.
nextstep 14y ago
For a post titled "How I Lost Access to my Google Account today" this article does a terrible job explaining how he lost access to his account. Was it just a totally random alorithmic error? The guy doesn't even have a theory about what he might of done?
- ehsanakhgari 14y ago
  This is the main thing which sucks about all this. I still don't have any clue on why this happened. The "how" is exactly how I explained it: I woke up this morning, and my account was disabled.
  - jedc 14y ago
    Here's a link that might be helpful: http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1752770 http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a...
  - jedc 14y ago
    Here's a link that might be helpful: http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1752770 http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a...
  - jedc 14y ago
    http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1752770 http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a...
- krelian 14y ago
  >Was it just a totally random alorithmic error? The guy doesn't even have a theory about what he might of done? I lost my adwords account one day, I wasn't even using it at the time. From what I gathered from support I lost it because a year and half earlier I had run two ads that were against the TOS. These ads were running for a total of 4 hours BTW and were of course approved by Google before going online. I have no idea how they tune their algorithm so recklessly. I posted about it on HN before and someone brought up the idea (from experience) that the landing pages I used (I did not own the landing pages) were changed during those 18 months to something that is against the TOS and my account was flagged because I had used them in the past.
teknover 14y ago
Isn't the question of why the account was locked just as pertinent as how? What would be racing through my mind was my account hacked, as if so maybe other services I use be hacked. Or did I possibly break the terms of service? If so, what may have been the justified reasons for me doing so, or Google's reason for preventing me so? That's where full communication with Google would be so essential to remove the ambiguity and resolve what may be a bigger question at hand.
troymc 14y ago
Some thoughts: - If you pay $50/year for Google Apps, you can use your own domain name, so you can change your mail server without changing your email address, and you also get access to customer service from Google. I have Google Apps and the one time I contacted them, they got back to me right away. - Just like it's a good idea to backup your local computer, it's a good idea to backup the data in your cloud services. There are numerous options. Backupify, CloudPull, and ThinkUp (thinkupapp.com) are some which come to mind.
- Tichy 14y ago
  You don't even have to pay to use gmail with your own domain. I find it difficult to find the relevant links, though.
  - Ecio78 14y ago
    but in this way you dont have support and if something is not working you have no one to complain with.. even though it seems by what i'm reading here that no one is safe, neither paid google apps users...
  - fauigerzigerk 14y ago
    It's here: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html I use Apple Mail for backup. The only issue is the TTL setting for the DNS MX record. Some domain hosts set this to 24 hours, which means it may take up to 48 hours for all mails to get through after you switch to a different mail server.
- yaix 14y ago
  To backup my "cloud" data, I need to click through vendor specific data download pages every time and then download gigabytes of data every time. A backup of my local data is semi-automatic by running a shell script that rsync's everything to my USB HDD. I like local better, I think.
nickm12 14y ago
I avoid using Google services, but for the ones I do use, I have a separate account for each.
Shank 14y ago
For the record, if you just read this and you can't/won't switch off, make sure you have recovery options set to recover your account. You can setup: - An alternate email - A phone number - Alternate email addresses - A recovery question Note, however, that the latter will only work if your account hasn't been accessed in 24 hours. If you have 2factor enabled, make sure you have backup codes printed as well.
fauigerzigerk 14y ago
What I don't get is why the very first step in Google's automated process is to lock down the entire account. The debate is around the scalability of support, but that doesn't explain why the automated first response is so radical and so radically stupid. The anger and rage Google provokes by not letting people log in and access their own data is totally unnecessary. They could just as well let people log in, view their data and receive email but prevent them from sending mail, publishing content, uploading more stuff, etc. This is not simply about automation or no automation. It's about smarter automation and an intelligently staged response to any suspected issues. If algorithms are to be accepted as decision makers, they have to be gentle and not treat everyone like a criminal as soon as there is some suspicion.
- shabble 14y ago
  I suspect it's for the same reason as they never reveal any details about their search ranking techniques or why some SEO or suspected fraud got your AS/AW account banned - it's an information leak which people will abuse. The downside to running such a heavily automated ship is that without countermeasures, a sophisticated attacker could map out the thresholds of your fraud/misuse detection system, and then keep just below triggering point. On top of that, there are actually situations in which you might want your account to be suspending quickly - ideally before an intruder can cause too much damage or access any valuable information. Some sort of graduated response is clearly necessary, but the real issue is the complete lack of timely dispute investigation/resolution. And it's probably a hard enough problem to resist automation for quite a while yet. Edit: This obviously only applies to situations where they might reasonably expect you to be malicious, or someone else to be in control of your account. Immediate irrevocable suspension over some tiny ToS violation is pure madness
  - fauigerzigerk 14y ago
    So we have two cases: 1) A suspected TOS violation by the legitimate owner of the account. Trying to prevent this via obscurity is crazy and counter-productive as people cannot learn from honest mistakes. It also antagonizes people who become victims of bad algorithms. There is no reason why the kind of staged response I outlined couldn't work in this case. 2) A suspected security breach that puts ownership in doubt. This should be handled by resetting the password and contacting the legitimate owner using contact information on file before the breach. It's really simple.
cnbeuiwx 14y ago
Im glad this happened, because while painful, it makes people think about their total dependence on a corporation being nice to them. You can take back your power by using smaller corporations for essential services such as email, making sure they are NOT located in the USA (should be obvious, but I feel I should reinforce that you cant get privacy in the USA). Then again, if you use Google, perhaps you dont care about privacy in the first place.
sunyc 14y ago
if things are important, set up a google apps for domain, people.
lucian1900 14y ago
I mean no disrespect, but if you have no backups for something it's your fault when it's gone. Google's support sucks and they desperately need to improve it. But people also need to back things up, dammit.
kzrdude 14y ago
> I have been a Gmail user probably since 2004, and I have tens of thousands of work-related and personal emails stored in my account, some of which being extremely important to me. We tell people they need backups. With a TOS like "we can shut you down at any time for any reason", you definitely need backups for Gmail too if it's important.
michaelfeathers 14y ago
I wonder why gmail can't suspend people by giving them readonly access. It could be time bounded, say 30 days, to allow people to migrate data off.
sl4yerr 14y ago
Google's lack of customer service never ceases to amaze.
lifeformed 14y ago
Are there any good alternatives to gmail that include tools for migrating an existing gmail account?
kappaknight 14y ago
You never said "how" you lost your account... On a side note, it's sh*t like this that make law makers create crazy laws that would stop poor support like this. I for one would almost want government intervention to make sure when cloud services cut you off, they don't take hostage of your data and history too. I recognize it's a terrible/horrible solution, but if the companies themselves can't do the right thing, government mandate would have to be next. Cause in this case, it's not like we can vote with our wallets to make it go away when the stuff is free. Also, imagine the number of jobs Google could create if they hired and trained a support staff for all their products? There's a lot of stuff that would still benefit from a human touch.
- mjwalshe 14y ago
  Yes that's the danger for Google all it takes for one case to go very high profile and they will be living with the court/government sanctioned remedy - that is why banks and other organizations have independent ombudsman - they want to avoid the government stepping in.
tferris 14y ago
That sucks. Reading your tragedy I am about to set up a new main identity with local mail storage: - getting a dedicated domain - getting either google apps or another web mailer - setting up new email address for 50+ services - finding some local client, doing backups and what ever mail account migration is a lot of work ...
bbwharris 14y ago
This is a little scary, a lot of people rely on Gmail. Im sensing a fundamental shift from "Free" to "Pay for it" for exactly this reason. When you are a free customer, no one has to care about you. When you are a paying customer, you suddenly have a voice. And no, having ads does not mean that you are paying. Someone else is paying for those ads, if anything they are sponsoring your ability to enjoy a free service devoid of customer support.
- seles 14y ago
  Except he was paying, and still got no voice.
robmay 14y ago
www.backupify.com lets you backup your gmail to another location
telemekus 14y ago
is there not a business opportunity here? to make something as reliable as Gmail, but with better care and attention to Users, that a person could roll their own mail service from it?
jbrayton414 14y ago
Cloud-based services are great, but I think it is wise to store a local backup of your data. I wrote an app called CloudPull (http://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/ http://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/) to do exactly that for your Google account. Whether you use my app or an alternative, you need local backups.

272 points by ehsanakhgari 14y ago

rollypolly 14y ago

User since 2004. Wow. Is there a way to export tens of thousands of emails from Gmail?

thought_alarm 14y ago
The OS X Mail.app does an excellent job of backing up your Gmail account using the standard POP3 and IMAP protocols. Every email I've received in the last eight years is stored on my MacBook, indexed in Spotlight, backed up in Time Machine, and available for offline reading whenever I need it. If my Gmail account was suspended tomorrow it would be a nuisance, but I would not lose any data and could recover from it quickly enough.
skeletonjelly 14y ago
Well, there's IMAP and POP. That should do the trick.
uptown 14y ago
This guide show you how: http://helpdeskgeek.com/how-to/export-all-email-from-gmail/ http://helpdeskgeek.com/how-to/export-all-email-from-gmail/
- DarkShikari 14y ago
  I tried this, but Thunderbird simply locked up due to the sheer volume of emails (I subscribe to LKML and other high-volume mailing lists). I haven't been able to find any good backup solution anywhere, and articles like this really scare me.
  - cfinke 14y ago
    Thunderbird 11 is much better than Thunderbird 3.x was at handling a GMail backup. I've just finished backing up ~120,000 messages using Thunderbird 11 (archiving them into monthly folders about once an hour during the backup), and it's doing fine. (I tried the same thing a year ago with Thunderbird and gave up after 45 minutes.)
    - aDemoUzer 14y ago
      good to hear. I had tried THunderbird in the past but it would just crash. Just started today for first time in a year and just upgraded from V7 to v11. Working good so far.
  - ef4 14y ago
    Try getmail. I've used it to suck down a very large amount of mail.
    - stock_toaster 14y ago
      I prefer fdm[1], but I agree that cli mail fetch tools are great for this. [1]: http://fdm.sourceforge.net/ http://fdm.sourceforge.net/
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
gkanai 14y ago
http://www.dataliberation.org/ http://www.dataliberation.org/
octopus 14y ago
Yes, any email client will make a local copy of your Google emails. If you use multiple operating systems, or you want to use a high quality open source client, best choice is Thunderbird (this is what I use). On Windows the default email client is Outlook. On Mac, iPhone, iPad the default email client is named Mail. All of the above email clients will save your emails from Gmail on your HDD.
Jach 14y ago
I used getmail: http://datalinkcontrol.net/dlc/content/gmail-backup-getmail http://datalinkcontrol.net/dlc/content/gmail-backup-getmail (Leave out the password from the config to be prompted when you run getmail.)
akulbe 14y ago
If you're on a Mac, DEVONthink Pro Office has an option to import email into a database. The archive option in DEVONthink keeps all the attachments and everything, and you can easily search for an open an email, and it will open in your local mail client. I've found it very helpful.

RexRollman 14y ago

This is one of the things that makes me worry about using Google for email. When it works, which is almost all of the time, it works great, but when there are problems, it is difficult to get assistance.

thezilch 14y ago
Shouldn't this worry you about ANY email service; even those that you are 100% in control? Backup important data to separate services; have separate services to read this data; do it often, including the read -- make sure your backups work.
- machrider 14y ago
  Yes, but the specific problem with Google is they have practically zero customer support. There is no one you can call to get help, and they apparently feel no obligation to respond to problems in a timely fashion.
  - Drbble 14y ago
    If a 100K people, an insanely huge number, experienced crippling Gmail failure, that is roughly a 0.1% chance that it would affect you on your lifetime. Avoiding Gmail for this is like avoiding planes and cars and houses because you saw on the news that one blew up somewhere.
- terinjokes 14y ago
  Haven't checked my backups in probably a year or more. Still going strong, and still readable. Thanks for the reminder. For everyone else, I'm using backupify.com to backup my Gmail and Google Contacts (and sent tweets, for some reason…)
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
krelian 14y ago
>but when there are problems, it is difficult to get assistance. It's not only email. I got my adwords account banned in a ridiculous manner (got banned out of the blue 18 months after a supposed offense), the email replies were so generic and unhelpful (and obviously not written by a native English speaker), it was really infuriating. Fortunately for Google they can do without my $200 yearly spending on adwords.

loverobots 14y ago

Congrats on making it to page one, your account will be restored within hours. Many have their adsense and Adwords linked to suspended Gmail accounts too. It can cripple their business.

rooshdi 14y ago
Yea, unfortunately not everybody has the good fortune of making it to the top of HN. I had a personal Gmail account wrongfully disabled over a year ago, and after filling out every form I could find and not receiving any helpful feedback for a year, I just gave up and decided to cut my losses. However, after reading this article I checked to see if it was still disabled and, lo and behold, I was logged in! I still don't know whether to be happy or pissed, but at least it works for now.

credo 14y ago

OP says >>We've all (yours truly included) heard about the importance of owning your digital data, the downsides of vendor lock-in, and how if you're being provided a free service, you're the product, not the customer. But I honestly never understood how deep this problem is, and how severe the consequences can be ("surely this cannot happen to me", right?!). Excellent point. Btw one easy way to maintain a local copy of all your gmail-emails is to use a mail client (like Outlook or Apple Mail) with gmail. With Outlook, for example, you can easily download and move emails into a PST/OST file on your PC.

larrys 14y ago
"one easy way to maintain a local copy" The other way is to maintain a non local copy by setting up a forward to another email account elsewhere. That's automatic and doesn't require downloading to your local machine and happens in real time.
wvenable 14y ago
Backing up is fine, but the problem is you still don't own your identity. If your email address is xxx@gmail.com you've lost that forever and that could be a big problem.
- Drbble 14y ago
  That's a problem anywhere. You have to own your own name or share it with someone you trust for life or just adapt to change like we did before cell phone number portability.
- kaybe 14y ago
  As long as you still have your adress book you can set up a new account and tell everyone. If you have that adress book, that is.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- drucken 14y ago
  Set up your own domain name for $5/year or less and use the free email aliasing that comes with it, e.g. paul@wvenable.me would be aliased to paulharris@gmail.com at your DNS provider. Then you only ever pass around wvenable.me addresses. If you get a good provider, they will give you unlimited free aliasing (though they may not allow catch-all address for free, which redirect anything@ to some default address, due to spam potential). Combined with monthly backups via IMAP or export from your actual email providers, you will never be dependent in either identity, contacts or content with any single provider. Needless to say, all of the above is trivial to setup for a typical HN'er.

macspoofing 14y ago

I had my google account suspended for a few hours a few months back. Why? Because, I was sending myself a set of icons, and I carelessly dragged the folder in, which caused each one to upload separately (30 altogether). I noticed it quickly enough, and closed the tab. When I went back in, my account was suspended. No recourse. Nobody to talk to. Nobody to complain to. Honestly, I'd rather just pay a monthly fee for the damn thing if it meant a unilateral action such as an account suspension wouldn't happen without prior warning. I'm serious Google. It's a good service. Take my money.

vibrunazo 14y ago
I rely on google so much, I would certainly pay for support if the option was available.
- ra 14y ago
  Isn't that what Google apps for business offers? I don't know if you can port an @gmail.com email address in, but if you have your own domain for $5 / user / month you get phone + email support.
  - patricklynch 14y ago
    Yes it is. The SLA is 99.9% uptime until you do something against their terms of service, but even then you'll still have somebody call and complain to. Also, I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure it's standard to set it up on your own domain and forward data from any gmail.com addresses you care about.
  - Figs 14y ago
    I tried to use their service to do that recently since I do like the GMail interface, but I couldn't create an account. The domain name had apparently already been used with them by a previous owner. There was no obvious way to fix it other than to kick someone else out of their gmail (as far as I could tell -- I'm not sure what exactly would be reset in the process), and no way to contact customer service unless you already had an account. Since I couldn't safely create an account without talking to customer support, and couldn't talk to customer support unless I created an account I was stuck in a catch-22. By that point, I realized that I don't want to deal with yet another god-damned unsupported Google product and made other arrangements. Hell, I would have been willing to pay $5/mo at the time too -- it'd be a lot easier than what I had to go through to get my mail working. Maybe their support is fantastic once you get an account working; I don't know -- I couldn't get that far to find out.

jrockway 14y ago

Just out of curiosity, did you use two factor authentication on the account? I understand that a common reason for accounts becoming disabled is because someone guessed the password, logged in, and then sent a bunch of spam (or something similarly evil). Two-step authentication makes this attack significantly more difficult. (But, of course, it makes your email harder to use. And malware can still steal your "remember this computer for 30 days" cookie.)

ehsanakhgari 14y ago
No, I was not using the two factor authentication feature. I still don't know what caused this, but yeah, my account might have been hacked.

frankydp 14y ago

https://www.backupify.com/ https://www.backupify.com/ GApps backup 36 bucks a user a year.

motti_s 14y ago

This happened to me once and it took a while until they reinstated my account. To date I have no idea why it happened. I thought about moving to another service, but unless you setup your own SMTP server (probably not a good idea), you never really have full control. Here is what I recommend you do (before getting locked out): 1. Use your own domain for email and host it on gmail (free) - do not use yourname@gmail.com, but yourname@yourdomain.com. 2. Create a secondary email account and have your primary account forward all emails to it. If you get locked out, your account still accepts emails. I believe that forwarding still works as well, though I haven't been able to verify it (need to get locked out again...). Then either respond from your secondary account, or change your mx records to point to another service, or even to your own temporary SMTP server. It's not a complete / ideal solution. You still don't have access to emails you sent (could be done using IMAP, but I didn't bother) and to other Google services. But it might be OK as a temporary solution until you get your account back.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
kijin 14y ago
Some paid services have a feature that forwards a copy of all of your sent messages to another address in real time. They do this by adding a BCC to every sent message. This allows you to have copies of every single message, both sent and received.
ajross 14y ago
Why is setting up your own mail server a bad idea? I've been running my own for 13 years now (plain old postfix and dovecot on whatever linux distro I favor at the time). It works great.
- motti_s 14y ago
  I agree, it's not necessarily a bad idea. I meant that most people (even most hackers) probably won't do it. I think the biggest issue is reliability, since if your SMTP server is down emails sent to you are rejected.

overgard 14y ago

Somewhat of a sidenote, but this is why I refuse to use google+: my gmail account is too important to me to risk of linking it to another google service. Especially considering the stories of people's entire google accounts getting shutdown randomly because of an "algorithm" or whatever. I like the products google makes, but their complete refusal to have any sort of customer service makes me hesitant to rely on them for anything beyond what I trust them with now.

ajross 14y ago
"The stories" are sort of an exaggeration. My memory is that Google did that (disabling a gmail account while freezing a google+ account) once, apparently by mistake, and corrected it within something like 48 hours. Are there other examples I've forgotten?
- losvedir 14y ago
  Well there was that kid who lost access to his gmail account once he put his real birthday into G+.
  - Drbble 14y ago
    Because he was underage and it was illegal for Google to serve him email?
    - pyre 14y ago
      I don't think that it's technically illegal to serve email to someone under 13 years of age. That's just the conservative take on the law that most sites have taken. [You may be able to allow < 13 year olds with parent's permission, but most sites probably feel that it's too much effort/risk to do that.]
- Steko 14y ago
  Linked article? Other people in this thread?
- 14y ago

loverobots 14y ago

My advice for those that have other Google services tied to an email account: do not use that account to send email. You minimize the odds of getting banned and frozen out of a lot of things

kevinchen 14y ago

The site went down. Cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=cache:http://ehsanakhgari.org/blog/2012-04-14/how-i-lost-access-my-google-account-today&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?client=safari&#...

suyash 14y ago

Thanks for such an eye opener!! Good luck gettings yours back, I'm going to back up mine this weekend!

nextparadigms 14y ago

So is there anything he did that caused this? Or did it just happen completely random?

zxy 14y ago
Considering the post is titled "How I lost access to my Google account today," there is a lack of how. It's well known that your data should be redundant, this is one of those 'I didn't make a backup' posts.

read_wharf 14y ago

Don't put your stuff in there, because they are not going to treat it with the same importance that you do.

nextstep 14y ago

For a post titled "How I Lost Access to my Google Account today" this article does a terrible job explaining how he lost access to his account. Was it just a totally random alorithmic error? The guy doesn't even have a theory about what he might of done?

ehsanakhgari 14y ago
This is the main thing which sucks about all this. I still don't have any clue on why this happened. The "how" is exactly how I explained it: I woke up this morning, and my account was disabled.
- jedc 14y ago
  Here's a link that might be helpful: http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1752770 http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a...
- jedc 14y ago
  Here's a link that might be helpful: http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1752770 http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a...
- jedc 14y ago
  http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1752770 http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a...
krelian 14y ago
>Was it just a totally random alorithmic error? The guy doesn't even have a theory about what he might of done? I lost my adwords account one day, I wasn't even using it at the time. From what I gathered from support I lost it because a year and half earlier I had run two ads that were against the TOS. These ads were running for a total of 4 hours BTW and were of course approved by Google before going online. I have no idea how they tune their algorithm so recklessly. I posted about it on HN before and someone brought up the idea (from experience) that the landing pages I used (I did not own the landing pages) were changed during those 18 months to something that is against the TOS and my account was flagged because I had used them in the past.

teknover 14y ago

Isn't the question of why the account was locked just as pertinent as how? What would be racing through my mind was my account hacked, as if so maybe other services I use be hacked. Or did I possibly break the terms of service? If so, what may have been the justified reasons for me doing so, or Google's reason for preventing me so? That's where full communication with Google would be so essential to remove the ambiguity and resolve what may be a bigger question at hand.

troymc 14y ago

Some thoughts: - If you pay $50/year for Google Apps, you can use your own domain name, so you can change your mail server without changing your email address, and you also get access to customer service from Google. I have Google Apps and the one time I contacted them, they got back to me right away. - Just like it's a good idea to backup your local computer, it's a good idea to backup the data in your cloud services. There are numerous options. Backupify, CloudPull, and ThinkUp (thinkupapp.com) are some which come to mind.

Tichy 14y ago
You don't even have to pay to use gmail with your own domain. I find it difficult to find the relevant links, though.
- Ecio78 14y ago
  but in this way you dont have support and if something is not working you have no one to complain with.. even though it seems by what i'm reading here that no one is safe, neither paid google apps users...
- fauigerzigerk 14y ago
  It's here: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html I use Apple Mail for backup. The only issue is the TTL setting for the DNS MX record. Some domain hosts set this to 24 hours, which means it may take up to 48 hours for all mails to get through after you switch to a different mail server.
yaix 14y ago
To backup my "cloud" data, I need to click through vendor specific data download pages every time and then download gigabytes of data every time. A backup of my local data is semi-automatic by running a shell script that rsync's everything to my USB HDD. I like local better, I think.

nickm12 14y ago

I avoid using Google services, but for the ones I do use, I have a separate account for each.

Shank 14y ago

For the record, if you just read this and you can't/won't switch off, make sure you have recovery options set to recover your account. You can setup: - An alternate email - A phone number - Alternate email addresses - A recovery question Note, however, that the latter will only work if your account hasn't been accessed in 24 hours. If you have 2factor enabled, make sure you have backup codes printed as well.

fauigerzigerk 14y ago

What I don't get is why the very first step in Google's automated process is to lock down the entire account. The debate is around the scalability of support, but that doesn't explain why the automated first response is so radical and so radically stupid. The anger and rage Google provokes by not letting people log in and access their own data is totally unnecessary. They could just as well let people log in, view their data and receive email but prevent them from sending mail, publishing content, uploading more stuff, etc. This is not simply about automation or no automation. It's about smarter automation and an intelligently staged response to any suspected issues. If algorithms are to be accepted as decision makers, they have to be gentle and not treat everyone like a criminal as soon as there is some suspicion.

shabble 14y ago
I suspect it's for the same reason as they never reveal any details about their search ranking techniques or why some SEO or suspected fraud got your AS/AW account banned - it's an information leak which people will abuse. The downside to running such a heavily automated ship is that without countermeasures, a sophisticated attacker could map out the thresholds of your fraud/misuse detection system, and then keep just below triggering point. On top of that, there are actually situations in which you might want your account to be suspending quickly - ideally before an intruder can cause too much damage or access any valuable information. Some sort of graduated response is clearly necessary, but the real issue is the complete lack of timely dispute investigation/resolution. And it's probably a hard enough problem to resist automation for quite a while yet. Edit: This obviously only applies to situations where they might reasonably expect you to be malicious, or someone else to be in control of your account. Immediate irrevocable suspension over some tiny ToS violation is pure madness
- fauigerzigerk 14y ago
  So we have two cases: 1) A suspected TOS violation by the legitimate owner of the account. Trying to prevent this via obscurity is crazy and counter-productive as people cannot learn from honest mistakes. It also antagonizes people who become victims of bad algorithms. There is no reason why the kind of staged response I outlined couldn't work in this case. 2) A suspected security breach that puts ownership in doubt. This should be handled by resetting the password and contacting the legitimate owner using contact information on file before the breach. It's really simple.

cnbeuiwx 14y ago

Im glad this happened, because while painful, it makes people think about their total dependence on a corporation being nice to them. You can take back your power by using smaller corporations for essential services such as email, making sure they are NOT located in the USA (should be obvious, but I feel I should reinforce that you cant get privacy in the USA). Then again, if you use Google, perhaps you dont care about privacy in the first place.

sunyc 14y ago

if things are important, set up a google apps for domain, people.

lucian1900 14y ago

I mean no disrespect, but if you have no backups for something it's your fault when it's gone. Google's support sucks and they desperately need to improve it. But people also need to back things up, dammit.

kzrdude 14y ago

> I have been a Gmail user probably since 2004, and I have tens of thousands of work-related and personal emails stored in my account, some of which being extremely important to me. We tell people they need backups. With a TOS like "we can shut you down at any time for any reason", you definitely need backups for Gmail too if it's important.

michaelfeathers 14y ago

I wonder why gmail can't suspend people by giving them readonly access. It could be time bounded, say 30 days, to allow people to migrate data off.

sl4yerr 14y ago

Google's lack of customer service never ceases to amaze.

lifeformed 14y ago

Are there any good alternatives to gmail that include tools for migrating an existing gmail account?

kappaknight 14y ago

You never said "how" you lost your account... On a side note, it's sh*t like this that make law makers create crazy laws that would stop poor support like this. I for one would almost want government intervention to make sure when cloud services cut you off, they don't take hostage of your data and history too. I recognize it's a terrible/horrible solution, but if the companies themselves can't do the right thing, government mandate would have to be next. Cause in this case, it's not like we can vote with our wallets to make it go away when the stuff is free. Also, imagine the number of jobs Google could create if they hired and trained a support staff for all their products? There's a lot of stuff that would still benefit from a human touch.

mjwalshe 14y ago
Yes that's the danger for Google all it takes for one case to go very high profile and they will be living with the court/government sanctioned remedy - that is why banks and other organizations have independent ombudsman - they want to avoid the government stepping in.

tferris 14y ago

That sucks. Reading your tragedy I am about to set up a new main identity with local mail storage: - getting a dedicated domain - getting either google apps or another web mailer - setting up new email address for 50+ services - finding some local client, doing backups and what ever mail account migration is a lot of work ...

bbwharris 14y ago

This is a little scary, a lot of people rely on Gmail. Im sensing a fundamental shift from "Free" to "Pay for it" for exactly this reason. When you are a free customer, no one has to care about you. When you are a paying customer, you suddenly have a voice. And no, having ads does not mean that you are paying. Someone else is paying for those ads, if anything they are sponsoring your ability to enjoy a free service devoid of customer support.

seles 14y ago
Except he was paying, and still got no voice.

robmay 14y ago

www.backupify.com lets you backup your gmail to another location

telemekus 14y ago

is there not a business opportunity here? to make something as reliable as Gmail, but with better care and attention to Users, that a person could roll their own mail service from it?

jbrayton414 14y ago

Cloud-based services are great, but I think it is wise to store a local backup of your data. I wrote an app called CloudPull (http://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/ http://www.goldenhillsoftware.com/) to do exactly that for your Google account. Whether you use my app or an alternative, you need local backups.