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I wish they'd let me recover my original -- I lost my TOTP generator, and the codes I'd written down in a paper notebook were rejected. I even hunted down the e
by firefax 10mo ago
I wish they'd let me recover my original -- I lost my TOTP generator, and the codes I'd written down in a paper notebook were rejected. I even hunted down the electronic copy in case there was a transcription error -- seemed like some failure in their systems was causing me to lose access despite having followed proper procedures.
Lost a decade and a half of correspondence dating back to my teenage years. I had imported my phone number I'd had since I was 16 into voice, and it doubled as my Signal number. I even had a Gsuite subscription so I could use their (admittedly decently) UI to power my firstname @ lastname dot com email address.
I will never use their services again, I was really digusted by this failure.
- ryukoposting 10mo agoYikes. This post is an unsettling reminder that gmail is a single point of failure in my personal and financial security.
- cedws 10mo agoEmail services in general. My worst nightmare is my email provider (which isn't Google) going dark and losing access to everything.
- firefax 10mo agoIf you use a password manager like Keepass, you should still be able to log into your other accounts if you lost access and at least with financial institutions you can call, ask that no changes be made with without coming into the branch and showing ID.
- cedws 10mo agoYes, but many companies will also drag their feet, refuse for "security reasons", or you'll just never be able to reach them in the first place because their only support is an AI concierge that tells you the same thing over and over. As an example Anthropic and OpenAI don't let you change your email address.
- fph 10mo agoIf you use a password manager like Keepass, you can put your TOTP into it as well. With both a password and a keyfile it's still two factors, technically.
- saint_yossarian 10mo agoYou can use a custom domain with most providers, so when they go dark you can at least migrate to another one.
- 3eb7988a1663 10mo agoThat is moving the point of failure to the domain registrar. Which is probably less likely, but you are always relying on someone.
- cedws 10mo agoTwo things about fronting with your own domain: 1. You have to own that domain forever, until or at least until you're 100% confident that an email intended for you will never be sent to that domain ever again. Even then, there are security risks with giving up the domain. 2. You give up some privacy. You can use mailbox aliases but it doesn't really matter if all the mailboxes are tied to a domain registered to your name and address.
- tcfhgj 10mo agoWorst case you need to self host
- Hemospectrum 10mo agoGreat when it works. Too many senders will only deliver to widely used hosts, and silently fail for anything outside their tiny allowlist. Note that I'm not even talking about trying to send email FROM a self-hosted account, but trying to get someone else to send email TO such an account.
- ninalanyon 10mo agoWhy don't you keep a copy of your email offline?
- UltraSane 10mo agoRealizing this is why I bought my own domain name and pointed the mx records at Gmail. This way I can change it to different mails servers if needed, even self hosted. One useful thing you can do is configure Gmail to forward mail to unknown address to a known one. So I can create addresses like Facebook@ultrasane.com or Amazon@ultrasane.com, etc
- anal_reactor 10mo agoMy mother only uses the computer for fun. She scrolls Facebook and sends my aunt cringe photos. If she gets locked out of her email, no big deal. Maybe we should just panic less.
- fosco 10mo agoI still think about my lost address that I obtained when Gmail was invite only. My family still occasionally CCs it and it drives me nuts, I would pay money to at least have it shutdown so they don’t think I received an email. I had email forwarding to another address when stolen and immediately after it was stolen it had the weirdest messages, I tried multiple ways reaching out to google and it still bugs me I was unsuccessful. I’d love the their of my account to at least have it shutdown
- firefax 10mo agoI got mine when it was invite only too, I had it a very long time. I use protonmail now -- I think the "free" model enables providers to shrug and go "hey you don't pay us" (if there is support at all -- I've never been able to speak to a human about this issue)
- colechristensen 10mo ago>I think the "free" model enables providers to shrug and go "hey you don't pay us" (if there is support at all -- I've never been able to speak to a human about this issue) I also have paid services a lot of money where customer service was nonexistent until I did a credit card chargeback or raised an issue with government regulators. I'm trying to figure out exactly what I want to push my state legislature to encode into law with regards to customer service minimums that would cover anyone doing business in the state, free or paid.
- bruce511 10mo agoI'm in the camp that paying makes you a customer. Inversely using a free service makes you a user, not a customer. And as you correctly note, there I'd no "user service" department. You can of course push for any law you like, but I expect laws protecting "users" to be toothless. Basically the TOS will boil down to "we can do anything we like" - which I guess is more or less what they say now. I find it helpful to think of users as distinct from customers because it let's you understand the provider company motivations. For example, Google's customer's are advertisers. Hence they cull services not conducive to advertising. Most startups see VCs as the customer. Their business model is to sell shares to VCs in round after round. Seen in that light their attitude to users is rational and users only exist as props to VC sales. VCs (and founders) are chasing an exit, which is usually acquisition or aquihire. Your use of the service will thus rarely survive the exit. These are not things to be outraged about. They are all completely rational and predictable outcomes. When you use a service, these are factors you should evaluate.
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago> I will never use their services again, I was really digusted by this failure Isn’t this inherent to not choosing an (EDIT: external) account-recovery method? The flip side to allowing account recovery at Google’s discretion is lessened security for everyone. (Obviously not black and white. And I agree Google should have flexibility for old accounts. But it’s an odd thing to reject a major provider over.)
- loloquwowndueo 10mo agoop said they had recovery codes but they didn’t work.
- Sophira 10mo agoThey did have a method to recover their account that they tried, though - they said that they used the account recovery codes, but that they were rejected. (Those would be the codes that Google gives you when you initially set up 2FA.)
- JumpCrisscross 10mo agoSorry, I meant an external recovery method. Another e-mail address or a phone number.
- subscribed 10mo agoAnother email address is useless. Another phone humber only works if you didn't lose that phone.
- ashv 10mo agoWhy would another email address be useless?
- ncann 10mo agoI had email address X (gmail) that I hadn't logged into for a long time. One day I tried to log in to it. Correct password, but Google, for some reason, simply decided there's something suspicious about my login and blocked it. X had Y as the "recovery email", and I had access to Y, and I indeed received an email from Google sent to Y that it blocked a suspicious login to X. However, THERE WAS NO WAY TO USE Y TO GAIN ACCESS TO X. Google simply did not offer that option for X, and I had no idea why.
- macrolime 10mo agoI had something kinda similar happen to my hotmail account. While I didn't lose access to it, I lost more than a decade of correspondence dating back to my teenage years. The reason was that Microsoft at some point required you to "login" once every 30 days. It seems they only counted logins through their web interface or something like that, so even though I was receiving emails daily, I didn't trigger a "login" in their system. They then deleted all my emails, but I could still login.
- lurk2 10mo agoThis happened to me ten years ago. A while later they did the same thing with my Minecraft login that I had purchased before the EULA was in place; I’ve avoided their services like the plague since then.
- valiant55 10mo agoI had this issue with my alternative account. Despite my main account being associated (not by recovery, I think this predates that feature), and most messages being forwaded to my main I was never able to successfully recover the credentials.
- DetectDefect 10mo agoBack up your seeds! Aegis for Android lets you do encrypted exports.
- xeonmc 10mo agoOr just write down the TOTP seed on paper backups instead of backup codes.
- jonway 10mo agoWorks for google (should!) but man there are some platforms that don’t expose the Totp code, or let you redisplay it! Sometimes they make you remove the old one before you can make a new one, too.
- cuu508 10mo agoSo don't put it off until it is too late -- if you haven't already, regenerate and copy TOTP seeds to paper now. When you set up TOTP on a new account, copy the TOTP seed to paper then and there, resist the "I'll do this later".
- fc417fc802 10mo agoIf it isn't backed up it doesn't exist. Corollary (likely unpopular I'd hazard) - hardware token implementations that I can't back up to paper don't exist as far as I'm concerned.
- cuu508 10mo agoMy policy is to enroll multiple WebAuthn keys and treat the second, third etc. key as the backup.
- DetectDefect 10mo agoI stopped using webauthn for this reason, plus the fact requires a ton of intrusive browser features and access. This surely will enrage most readers, which itself reveals an interesting conditioning that has taken place.
- trollbridge 10mo agoI'm paranoid and print off my TOTP key for each account I make that might matter in any way.
- UltraSane 10mo agoSave a picture of the TOTP QR code and print it out.
- khana 10mo ago[dead]
- TacticalCoder 10mo ago> I will never use their services again, I was really digusted by this failure. Without such measure anyone with your password could "reset" your 2FA. The solution to "I may lose my 2FA" is not to make GMail a 1FA: it is to configure beforehand your GMail so that if your account is inactive for 6 months, access to your account is given to a person of your choice. It's so that a death spouse (for example) can eventually access the account.
- Beijinger 10mo agoGmail is a throwaway email. I lost my SIM and hence can't log in anymore. Never ever rely on Gmail.
- markdown 10mo agoHuh? Are phone numbers tied to physical sims in your country? You can't just ask the phone company to give you a new sim with the same number?
- dijit 10mo agoIf you’re on a contract that can work. If it’s a PAYG sim card then you’re out of luck without the PUK code, which, if you’ve lost the sim then you have most assuredly lost (or never had). PAYG is a lot more common in parts of western Europe than contracts. People associate contracts with “overly expensive” phone deals.
- exe34 10mo agono, I got my puk code from my phone operator when I moved services before. at least in the UK it works that way.
- dijit 10mo agoYes, but you are unlikely to have your PUK code (its on the card you got your sim with) if you have also lost the sim. Its a much more losable bit of plastic, and without it (or a contract) why would an operator give you the PUK code for a number they can’t prove you used to have access to? It would be impossible to tell if you are trying to steal someones number.
- exe34 10mo agoyou walk into the shop with your passport or driving licence....
- iwontberude 10mo agoYou think that sucks, my childhood angelfire is gone.
- cuu508 10mo agoTry contacting their support. They did help me regain access to my late 90s angelfire account, even though the original email address I had used was long dead.
- kalaksi 10mo agoWhoa, I noticed something similar. I was updating my password or something a few years back and decided to test the backup codes too. They didn't work. I don't know what went wrong but that got me worried a bit.
- iamthejuan 10mo agoThis is exactly what happened to me on Dropbox, where even the backup codes did not work.
- nomilk 10mo ago> seemed like some failure in their systems was causing me to lose access despite having followed proper procedures. I had the same problem with GitHub's backup codes not working: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35735996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35735996
- thiht 10mo agoI had the same issue with my Hotmail address. I know the address and password, but Microsoft won’t let me login. And they ask ridiculous things like, what emails are in the inbox. I haven’t used this address for 20 years, I just want to access the Hotmail address from when I was a teenager.
- jopsen 10mo agoSend some emails to the address, then you'll know what is in the inbox :)
- thiht 10mo agoHaha that’s clever, I will try this
- sillyfluke 10mo ago>I just want to access the Hotmail address from when I was a teenager. Logging in doesn't solve your problem. It gets way worse after you log in [0]. At least now you still have hope. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36000161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36000161
- globular-toast 10mo ago> I will never use their services again, I was really digusted by this failure Was there ever really an agreement that they'd be storing your cherished memories for decades? I still treat email the same way I've done since the 90s. Your email provider is just a cache but you download and backup the messages yourself. Hopefully this has been a wake up call for you. If you care about data then you need a copy that you control and have a good backup plan.
- rr808 10mo agoWait a second - if you have gsuite it isn't a regular gmail account. Did you talk to gsuite team? If you even paid there is real support.
- RhysU 10mo agoI am fearful of losing my first.last@gmail.com and last.com access presently. Any Google Wallet/Payment folks that might help me..? Please see email in profile if so. Would really appreciate it. Story is I started a new job. I tried to add a corporate address for a corporate card to Google Wallet. This tripped some security indicator requiring me to upload government-issued ID. I did so twice without it working despite first/last/address match. I have tried also submitting an employment verification letter with the corporate address. Haven't heard back on the last attempt. I have also written but I have low hope that'll work. (Update: Nope, "Billing and Collections" isn't "Payments" but at least they wrote back). Because of the incomplete verification, all Google service payments are rejected right now. I am presently frantically emptying my Google One storage to get back under the free tier before my paid One subscription runs out. Literally, because I cannot submit a $2 payment I am right now removing attachments from 20 years of correspondence. This stinks. I just need a human to review what I submitted given the above context. There should be some middle ground between rejecting a new credit card address and de facto locking down someone's entire collection of Google services via manufacturing an inability to pay.
- remus 10mo agoAre you based in the EU? You should be able to file a GDPR request for your data.
- ninalanyon 10mo agoI'm mystified why technically competent people keep their email in the cloud. Do they never find themselves unable to refer to an email because they are not connected to the web? Isn't obvious that you risk losing everything if the provider goes bankrupt, there is a glitch in their system, or they change the rules? I use Thunderbird on my laptop precisely so that I have a copy of all my email. I can consult it while offline, I can switch providers, change my mail address, without losing anything and without having to rearrange anything.
- Ferret7446 10mo agoLet's be realistic here. The vastly more likely possibility is that you screwed up somewhere with your backup codes.