Well IMO it kinda makes sense that internally of all places you might actually make it hard to address it along that specific path to avoid any kinda of local shenanigans.
That's why you should have email on your own domain. If they lock you out you can quickly-ish migrate to a different provider without losing your email address. Not a solution but definitely softens the blow.
That is my arrangement and I've had it in place so long I don't even have to pay the $5, I have a free private GSuite on my own domain (yes they offered this to everyone 10+ years ago). What I realized today though while reading this story, is that my DNS account is backed by this same GMail account. What if I'm attacked and someone locks out my DNS account at the same time they take the sort of criminal actions in my account that that would get Google to shut it down? I could lose my domain and all my email forever. I think I'm moving to Fastmail.
i actually think it's useful to create a flow graph of all your most critical accounts, and how you might recover them if lost.
If you find many of them flow back to an account you cant control and may be shut down for arbitrary reasons, may want to reconsider your recovery/hierarchy.
yeah I have ProtonMail with 2 custom domains. It's decent I have gotten blocked from sending emails to Google custom domains. Total bullshit IMO, I think they do it on purpose.
I would have thought ensuring that workers at google, getting absolutely no special access to specific other accounts, is pretty much the most sacrosanct rule.
i.e. Google's unlikely to hand over the dossier they've assembled on 'what your husband has been up to that we considered bad enough to shut down their account'
Most definitely not saying this isn't a false positive - but the handling process for it it must assume it's a positive.
Now why the poster's husband can't get the info - that is somewhat worrysome.
- it's weird to be mistreated by your employer's own product (just the irony bend to it)
- if you want to appeal after a dead end, your choice is to make a huge public PR nightmare, or try to make an internal post/plea that gains traction. you'd be doing your own employer a service if you could have this issue resolved without a PR nightmare
I guess Google's ToS is between the employee's husband and Google and not the employee, the employee's husband, and Google. So there is no authorization for some random employee to "check up" on their partner, even though it sounds like escalating internally should help. (It should at least trigger, "we'd better look into this very carefully", though. If it didn't, that sounds like a problem. If it did, and the result is "yeah, this is legit", that's a very awkward position for everyone.)
I was in a similar situation when I worked at Google. My brother kind of disappeared, and my family asked if we could at least check if he logged into Gmail. I asked and was told no, and I understood why -- it's up to my brother to share what he's up to, not Google. (My brother was fine; just didn't like replying to email or answering his phone.)
When i worked there i got my blocked payment acc unblocked with an apology pretty easily. I cant recommend using google payments (or anything other than gmail) anymore though
I don't think it was a rule before, and I don't think it should be a rule now. This is missing an important opportunity to debug the process, since you have a separate way of finding out what's going on.
If you're not going to use that data when you get an opportunity like this to fix something, what's dogfooding and "trusted testers" all about?
It's sticking in your head in the sand out of a misguided attempt at being unbiased, instead of fixing things.
Someone posted a video on YouTube showing them bullying and humiliating one of my friends. I helped her report it. YouTube ignored it. I worked at Google at the time. I filed an internal ticket and YouTube ignored that, too. Years later, the video is still online.
Companies serve the shareholders. Shareholders want to spend as little money as possible on user support. I think new regulations are a good way to solve this problem for everyone. US consumer protection laws need updating for the Internet age.
I honestly believe companies making billions in dollars in profit every quarter should be legally required to provide proper human support to all of its customers and users.
Both Google and Facebook have ridiculously poor levels of support for the money they make.
I hate that they don't even tell you what you violated, like I'm sure this just causes more escalation and worse negative feelings for basically getting no additional information.
Illegal? Unlikely. A bad business move? Definitively.
As far as I know, the reason no company divulges information like this is to stop the endless protests and appeals from people. Dealing with people who believe they've done nothing wrong even though they have is tiresome and expensive and the more information you give them, the more ammunition they have to protest.
The result is innocent people like (presumably) OP's husband getting shafted by a short email without any details, but it's finanicially unattractive to change the system so without court or legislative action I doubt Google will improve their services any time soon.
The Sixth Amendment applies to criminal action by the government. Google isn’t the government, and even if we were to pretend they were, they are neither applying a criminal law nor imposing the kind of punishments which are inherently criminal no matter how the law authorizing them is characterized, so the Sixth Amendment is far from applicable.
Were they the government, either 5th (federal) or 14th (state) Amendment due procesos rights might be an issue, but, again, Google is not the government.
This is a good reminder to always backup your photos/docs elsewhere - if you have one Synology has a good Google integration that will do this automatically (I then send it up to Glacier for off-site). And also - eschew the convenience of OAUTH - just create an account at every site - it's annoying but at least you avoid you're entire life being locked out.
Synology also allows you to run your own contacts, calendar service and has a Google Photos equivalent called Moments (which includes the mobile app to autobackup photos).
The difference? You own the data on your own drive.
Synology also allows you to run your own mail server, with a web app similar to Gmail, if you want to go down that rabbit hole (MailPlus/MailPlus Server).
This is a reminder to get away from google services. It’s just not worth it. Give a few bucks Each month to a company where you are the customer and not the product.
I will say that I can only imagine how annoying and frustrating this is, but the way he's approaching this on twitter is not going to win him any fans in his reporting chain. In a fight like this you need senior management as allies wanting to help, not as enemies as you stomp your feet and embarrass them.
Reporting chain wasn't helping him. This is obviously his last resort. I pay for Google services and stuff like this is motivating me to look into migrating away (the only thing I _actually_ care about is mail).
Some people care about more than just money. Not trying to brag, but I did get an offer from a FAANG company which I turned down, suspecting that I wouldn't be as happy there.
Personally ethics play a big role in my happiness, but I acknowledge and appreciate that being able to chose is a rare privilege.
Have they completed the official escalation procedure for resolving issues with Google products?
It sounds like they're at the point where they are supposed to contact a friend who writes for the New York Times, or similarly prominent outlet, to have a story written about their predicament.
This usually resolves the issue, but if it does not, they should run for and win a U. S. Senate seat, then forward the details of their issue on official Senate letterhead.
Wait, what? There are only 100 US senators and Google already spends tens of millions of dollars per year lobbying them. I'm not saying I agree with the GP point, but if Google wanted to give those senators free personal tech support it would not be prohibitively expensive.
Currently I am trying to figure out how to move e-mail away from google, not my personal one, but my company e-mail.
Couldn't figure out yet...
The reason is that despite being a corporate costuemer we don't pay enough to have access to support, and some issues we had, the only thing the FAQ and documentation did was redirect us to a page behind payment.
I left Gsuite for Zoho (mail) a couple of years ago after reading so many of these Google account closure scares. I cannot speak to the quality of the Zoho office apps, but their email seems reliable and allows me to have over a dozen domains tied to one account at a tiny cost per month. Fastmail, as I recall, couldn't or wouldn't allow many domains tied to one account (otherwise I would have chosen them).
I don't know if your account was different, but I have 15 domains on my Fastmail account and almost a hundred specific aliases (in addition to the catch-all) and they've not complained one bit.
We already use thunderbird. In fact that is part of the reason we want to move away from Google, they declared Oauth 2 will be mandatory, and thunderbird last I checked didn't had all the certifications needed, and we had a scare when suddenly all our company thunderbirds couldn't login on gmail-based accoutns at all, and we needed them to, to send urgently some documents to the government.
When this topic comes up periodically, some people comment about the difficulty of having their outgoing mail often blacklisted or automatically marked as spam when being sent to major email hosts (such as Google, MS, etc.) Have you found this to be a problem?
>When this topic comes up periodically, some people comment about the difficulty of having their outgoing mail often blacklisted or automatically marked as spam when being sent to major email hosts (such as Google, MS, etc.) Have you found this to be a problem?
I had this issue a couple of times (with Comcast IIRC) in the early oughts (somehow I found myself on a RBL/DNSBL). I resolved that fairly quickly.
I haven't had problems since. Just to make sure, I implemented SPF/DKIM/DMARC in my DNS zones. And I'm sure implementing DNSSec didn't hurt either.
And except for those few times 15-20 years ago, my environment has worked like champ.
I would love to see a step-by-step guide on how to move away from centralized services entirely. Maybe in favor of the various federated services that are popping up.
People post guides to HN periodically about how to do exactly this. But it will require a lot of effort and a carefully designed backup/failover plan for when your self-hosted things tank (or get hacked).
Don't use Gmail to signup for stuff. If you lose the account, you lose all the forgot password links, the email 2FA codes, and the communication with support.
Preferably, you should use your own domain (atleast for signing up).
Or use something like Tutanota [0], only for signing up for stuff. They have a very generous free plan. You should open it only to verify new accounts, and for 'forgot password' links.
I don't know why this got downvoted, I use 365 (in addition to other non-Google providers) and am quite happy with them for the accounts I use them for.
I don't really use google for anything; I never did, which probably made it easier than for those who had to switch. For e-mail I run a standard dovecot and postfix set up. For drive, I just scp files to a server. I don't take many photos or care. If I did, I suppose I'd just copy them over to my server as well. I run all of this stuff on a few old boxes at home (ancient laptops, old towers, what-have-you).
As a side question, to those who use google drive or similar, how do you stand it? I hate having to click through a bunch of dialogues to do stuff. Just being able to use a plain HTTP link is much better. I put stuff I want private in a directory that requires HTTP basic auth and it's so much easier. I can copy to/from on a phone by VPNing into my house and using a samba client. So much easier.
I moved my email + contacts + calendar to Fastmail, for files I use dropbox or iCloud it depends on the purpose and I use Apple Photos for photos. All services are much better than Google services.
I would never again trust Google with anything important on consumer services, I had similar experience as the OP.
I use Google Apps but with my own domain. My own domain gives me the opportunity to take my business elsewhere with limited impact. The caveat is that I pay $6 / month (instead of free).
Yep! This is exactly what I do. With Google Takeout, I don't have to worry about data loss if I get locked out of my account or other issues like that.
Fastmail. But the key thing is using my own domain name. You can actually use Gmail safely... as long as you are using your own domain name. If Google (or Fastmail) terminated my account, I could point my domain name to another mail service, and not lose access to any of my other services.
But as long as you're using an @gmail.com address as your digital identity, your access to all of your online accounts is tied up in that single arbitrary point of failure, to a company that does not view you as a valuable customer.
It's definitely not the cheapest option, but if you don't have a large storage requirement, 25 Mail St. is a good option. I host my own personal email, but have set a couple clients up with 25 Mail St. and it's been excellent. By far the best part is the support - all support is done by the engineers instead of customer support staff following a script. They're incredibly transparent about things like support statistics, and are understandably proud of their metrics. The main downside is the low amount of storage offered for the price.
It's run by the same company as Rimuhosting and Zonomi, if you're familiar with either.
Then the trust is placed in your registrar. Maybe that's where the trust should be placed from your perspective, but do note that you're still choosing to trust another organization who's interests may not totally align with yours.
Atleast where I live, and I choose local registrars, I can sue a registrar for the ownership of a domain, even if it was bought by someone else in the meantime, I can get it back.
The likelihood of loosing a domainname in my country (Germany) is fairly low unless you used it to actively (and provably) spread malware or commit other crimes (and your registrar will have to prove it and better hope they filed a police report, or their cancellation goes poof).
I use a more privacy-focused email provider, their lowest tier
costs 1 Euro/month and is enough for me, which means I still have near
free email with calendar sync.
I don't upload any photos or other files anymore, though. The
problem is that you can never fully trust those cloud providers
to keep the data safe, so you need other backups anyways. I was
thinking about using a more trustworthy service for off-site
backups though.
I have my own domain, and run exim+dovecot on a Linux machine for E-mail. This setup has run solidly for years. I serve E-mail for family and friends. No reliance on some cloud account for what is essentially the gateway to all of your password reset functions. When I first set it up, I had some deliverability problems, but once I had DKIM and SPF set up, it's been rock solid.
Every time this happens I think about reducing my dependence on google, however I'd love to be able to make this decision by evaluating the actual risk of this happening.
Does anyone know an estimate of how likely this is to happen to an individual on a per year basis?
Obviously that risk will change as the organization changes, but if it's happening to a couple hundred good faith accounts a year I'd probably put it off for quite some time.
7 billion people use Google. If you look at the likeliness of it happening to one guy out of 7 billion, it would be very, very small. But the problem is, once it is banned, you will probably lose a lot of important stuff permanently.
It’s probably closer to 70M but that’s probably absurdly off too. I bet there’s 70M people in the US alone who use Google services for valuable information. GMail alone is massive.
More likely you'll get locked out because account recovery now uses a heuristics based algorithm. This is what happened to me, thankfully I had nothing important on it.
Do you pay them or any of their subsidiaries for anything?
I have cell service on Google Fi. Long, painful (still-ongoing) story short, they shipped me a Pixel 4a that had no cell service. I went back and forth with support for ten days. Then they shipped me a replacement phone. I confirmed my current address. They sent me a shipping notification for my current address. FedEx ended up delivering the package, no signature required, to a town I used to live in five years ago. I double checked and my current address is the only one on the account.
Going back and forth with support has been useless. I paid for a phone that doesn't work, and I'm being charged for service that I can't use. My last recourse is to refute the payments with my CC company....but that also seems like the quickest way to get my entire Google/YT/Google Fi account locked up because it's all tied together.
I have been thinking about this for a while. Considering I prefer to keep the important data/emails on Gmail or Google drive for security and I really consider it important. Would it help if Google had a paid tier?
Say, if you can get into an annual plan, similar to what's there for hardware devices like Apple Care+. Just that, in this there is someone to help you through issues.
We used to pay 10% of our AWS bill for the AWS support plan because when you needed the help, it really made sense to have someone looking at it with some SLAs.
A second option is, Google can just make consumer Gmail as an ad free paid service and then provide support for it as well. Plenty of people are paying $10/month for email services, so we have a price point that works for people. Email is very crucial to online identity, and I would trust Google the most with security among the other providers so I would happily pay for it.
Edit: As someone pointed out, they have Google One at least for storage. It has proper support. Maybe it makes sense to extend it for other services as well. https://one.google.com/about
> I have been thinking about this for a while. Considering I prefer to keep the important data/emails on Gmail or Google drive for security and I really consider it important. Would it help if Google had a paid tier?
It wouldn't, because Google is averse to any kind of customer support even for paying services. Even the "support" people that get attached to highly paid YouTube, GSuite, and other accounts get regularly stonewalled like this person and cannot help.
The only solution? Make sure all of your data is always backed up somewhere else.
Have you not seen all the similar things that happened over the years? This is not a new thing, it’s SOP. And though I think Google is especially bad, don’t ever have important data with a single company.
Start sooner rather than later. It's extremely hard to get off of them once you're tied to their services.
I'm basically down to email and some old Google Drives I need to clean out. Found a project in this thread that should help me with the Drives, just working on email now..
That's a partial solution. The author noted that account logins tied to the google account would no longer be usable either. The sites can do nothing to help that situation, since most sites do not have a way to "transfer account". I could not imagine losing access on a potential grand scale like that.
True, the full solution is to NEVER rely on Google as a single point of failure for anything. Which means backing up all photos/documents elsewhere and never using your Google account to auth with another service. I've always avoided tying my Google account to non-google services for just this reason and haven't ever had it be a problem.
At this point we've all got these 10 year old gmail accounts that we've used as the recovery email on 1,000 websites, and while... I guess it isn't really a big deal to lose a reddit or ycombinator account, it'd be nice if there was some other option to use as the recovery email for online banking that had the stability of google.
I'd happily pay for some sort of assurance -- "if you violate our TOS, we'll just put your email in receive-only mode" or something like that.
Buy a cheap domain from Gandi for 10 years. They provide free email and DNS. Use that email for anything you care about. Stop using your gmail account and forward your gmail to your domain's email account. Gradually, you'll switch your recovery emails to the domain that you own and control.
The other nice thing about this is you can be bob@domain.com rather than bob2746293@gmail.com and you can provide email accounts to your family and friends.
That's still a SPOF though. Over the years I've had various letters from registrars and registries threatening my account due to missing information or new requirements.
GANDI themselves once accused me of ToS violation because one account uses my initials ( as on my bank account ) instead of my forenames that they demanded. I migrated everything out of that account ASAP.
Ideally you need two completely different domains ( to avoid potential trademark issues ) in two different TLDs at two registrars.
The service is a tool. I would not "never" use a battery powered drill upon it's first power loss. It has it's use case. It is important to understand the limitations of any tool. This author helps us all understand the limitations of google.
Fully agree. I have a small business that spends 2k/y on Adwords, and support is an absolute joke. I have a significant stake in another that spends 50k/y, and support is the same - terrible. And it's even a challenge to get the bad support - you've got to hunt and jump through hoops to get to communicate with an actual human.
I've heard support is much better for GCP - but for me, the whole Google brand is tarnished, and because of my experiences with Adwords, I always choose Azure and/or AWS over GCP.
We were spending a couple million a year (admittedly, this was probably 5 years ago now I was dealing with this -- so could have been the dollar amount, could have been the timeframe) and never really had a hard time getting a hold of a human. And the ones we got a hold of were generally pretty attentive and actually understood what we were talking about, and could even help most of the time.
However the reps were pretty up front that as soon as a support issue crossed the line onto any other team at Google... you best just figure out a workaround, because even once we'd already crossed the threshold and had someone inside Google working on our behalf, there was just nothing that could be done.
And yeah, this has led me to be extremely resistant to moving _any_ infrastructure we care about to GCP. I have zero faith my account won't just be suddenly banned one day with no effective recourse. And I'd also never recommend any "paid support" option they offered like some people are suggesting they provide, because I'd have no faith in their support team being able to actually solve the sorts of issues that are hard for people to solve on their own.
> The only solution? Make sure all of your data is always backed up somewhere else.
Whenever there is a systemic problem, fixing the system is always a better solution than trying to fix individual behaviors. Backing things up is a good idea but that doesn’t fix the problem, it just helps mitigate some of the effects of the problem.
No. You should be backing up your Google digital artifacts to local storage or an object store you have access to and can control access to (for example, my partner knows how to get to our Backblaze B2 storage buckets and request a USB drive of all the data if needed, which contains a lifetime of documents, emails, voicemails, iCloud photo backups, etc).
If you insist on using Google, keep backups elsewhere. You cannot rely on them for support (although you might be able to get it, don’t count on it).
What is weird to me, is that you can't really back up Google Docs, Sheets, etc. because as far as I know, the document format is closed. I understand you can use Google Takeout, but documents export to Word, drawings to JPG, etc. You cannot continue with the original elsewhere.
That's right. What you can do is use Microsoft Office formats, but Google makes that rather difficult. You have to download as Excel/Word then upload the file and delete the original Google Docs document. You can then edit the Office document in Google Docs/Sheets (with some limitations on collaboration I think).
I found it easier to move everything to Office 365. Google Takeout can export all data directly to OneDrive without having to download anything.
> What you can do is use Microsoft Office formats, but Google makes that rather difficult.
This right here is amazing and describes very well the moment in time we are living in. When using a Microsoft file format is [righly] considered the "open", "friendlier" option it really means the alternative [Google] is terrible. Microsoft used to be the Evil Borg that had everything proprietary.
Several years ago Microsoft (rightly) saw the writing on the wall that the way they were going to compete was to be the open solution to everyone else's walled garden. It has been a strategy that has worked out fantastically well for them and honestly MS is one of the very few tech companies I still have any respect for.
I think the hope is that you'll have better customer support options if you're actually paying them money, rather than the block hole that is the support for their free tier of products.
To be honest, I don't understand this. Why should someone paying for a product get better support than someone who doesn't? I understand companies which sell plans so that some users can have priority support, but quality should not change according to how much money you give. It's absurd. Everyone should be in the same boat.
Maybe there was a TOS violation here but it would help if someone can explain what went wrong with some SLA unless there is a reason they can't reveal it.
I’m guessing here, but if one were to write that one is unaware of which transgression against the hallowed TOS one has committed it’s possible that a dialogue may ensue... though considering everything I’ve read so far in this thread and others like it, I seriously doubt that.
For the first time in my life, I was able to talk to an honest to god support person over Chat for Google One support (I was trying to link my wife's storage w/ mine and it wasn't obvious how I'd do it).
Storage is paid, so I assume support is available.
Thanks for reminding about that. Seems like a no brainer to me that they should extend it. Google has so many tools that I depend on that I will happily pay extra for them in such plans.
If Google won't do it, why hasn't a 3rd party stepped up to provide the service? I'd gladly pay a trustworthy company a few dollars a month to automatically backup my gmail, google photos, and google docs. I don't want to do it locally, since that puts me on the hook for assuring physical safety and backups of my backups.
I suppose I could roll my own solution, but frankly I get tired of maintaining my one-off projects like that after a year or two.
Because it costs more than a few dollars a month. The net cost to users for Google is zero (or a token amount) because Google makes their money from data mining and selling your meta data.
Email addresses and inboxes are important to people. They are critical to our online identity.
Wiki mentions Gmail having 1.5 billion users. Imagine even 100M of them paying $100 per year. Makes Gmail a $10B product just on paid subscriptions, that is not a small amount.
You need stable business with at least few people employed, to make sure the lights don't go out, and that people fix issues when they come up. Storage cost is probably only small part of the price.
You also don't want it to be VC backed because such businesses will not be worth billions. (and if it will try to become such you will have similar problems as google)
For a competing service maybe, but they're talking about backups. I find the bigger issue is that not enough people believe they need a backup for the "cloud".
> since that puts me on the hook for assuring physical safety and backups of my backups
Only in the event that Google locks you out, at which point you can create a new backup elsewhere. If Google has a copy and you have a physical copy, then Google would have to lock you out at the very same moment your house burns down for you to lose any data.
This is a project I started working on but never finished. The problem is that people didn't care enough to pay for backups because they (are conditioned to) believe that Google is already safe and won't go away. The cloud is this magical thing that saves everything and unfortunately they don't realize otherwise until it stops working.
> I don't want to do it locally, since that puts me on the hook for assuring physical safety and backups of my backups.
Regardless of where you store your personal data, the proverbial buck always stops at your desk when it comes to assuming responsibility.
Paying someone else to store your data gives you someone to hold accountable to what happens to your data. But that accountability is always limited and doesn't dismiss you from managing that relationship. For instance, the other party is still entirely free to bring terms and conditions to the table, which are meant to mitigate liablity as far as the party which will host your content is concerned.
Put more succinctly, even when you rely on a cloud service, you're still on the hook to assure safety and backups of your own data.
> I suppose I could roll my own solution, but frankly I get tired of maintaining my one-off projects like that after a year or two.
Yeah, I'm gonna prod you on that one. :-)
For e-mail, you could run an script once a month that harvest all your e-mails over IMAP and roll them into TXT, HTML, EML,... whatever. You could go for one big file, or discrete files. You could even pain yourself and fit everything in an mbox file. Roll everything in a ZIP or TAR ball. Then you'd store output file in whatever service you want.
You could spin up a VPS, provision the entire thing and set up a script that does all that as some service or cron job or whathaveyou. Now you've got an entire stack to take care off. Not what you want.
Maybe this is a good use case to go serverless. You could string something together using AWS serverless. Write an AWS Lambda in Python or Java. Should be one single script. Store your e-mail backups in S3 or somewhere else.
The idea of such a solution is that it just runs in the background and it runs in a robust fashion with not too many moving parts. So, here you have something running indefinitely as long as the bill gets paid. Or amazon doesn't cut you off. But at least you've now got your e-mail mirrored on two independent services, which is marginally better then where you are right now. The only other major constraint here is being able to restore your e-mail from that backup in case of disaster.
There was a story a while back where someone had Google One, had their account disabled, and couldn't use Google One's support because they needed a Google Account (that was disabled).
Google One is $20/year for the base 100GB plan. I pay primarily so that there's a direct line to support in case something happens.
Otherwise I recommend using your own cloud storage buckets and/or a local NAS to store your data. It's easy enough to backup and sync across all of them now with various tools and services.
I've been a Google customer paying thousands per month and support was nothing more than lipservice. None of the support agents could do anything and I had to wait for an "account specialist" to reply every 24-48 hours with non-answers and requests for documents that I'd already sent 3-4 times again and again.
Support and customer experience is an afterthought for Google. They probably don't set out to be cruel, but they're very cavalier about incidental casual cruelty.
Google One was absolutely a nightmare experience for me. I signed up at launch, the service had severe issues syncing things. Took almost a week to sync backups that took Dropbox maybe a day. Then it kept flagging a ton of errors that basically said a bunch of my files couldn't be backed up. I talked to support and you do connect to a real person, but there was nothing they could do. then requested a refund, they didn't have the power to do that either. So it got escalated. I was told someone would reach out to me. That never happened. I contacted support again. Rinse, wash, and repeat I don't know how many times over a few weeks before the refund finally processed. During this time I talked to a manager who similarly had no authority to do anything. I was convinced support, though is a live person, has very limited authority and is really other there to relay basics on the product.
This is one of the reasons why I've finally began migrating to a custom domain + proton mail. Can't imagine the time it would take me to get back all the accounts registered to my email, not to mention those to which access would be lost forever.
I looked into this a bit a year or two ago, and wasn't happy with the alternatives. The main issue for me is that I never delete anything, and so I have nearly 500GB of email, dating back over 20 years (sadly I've lost earlier email due to the cost of even local storage back in those days). I don't want to deal with the data in any way, sorting through it, splitting it up, etc. I just want to dump it all into an email account and have it forever. Many of the alternatives that offer good privacy top out at 20GB or so for their most expensive plan (or less).
Tutanota was the one service I found that let you add (IIRC) arbitrary amounts of storage to your plan, but I found their web interface to be kinda clunky, and let the account expire. I keep wanting to look into this again, but never get around to it.
OneDrive is pretty damn cheap _and_ comes with access to Office on the web. 1tb per family member, with Office? Goodly.
There's no official Linux client, but there are open source ones that perform well.
You could drop your mbox onto a OneDrive sync and then use fetchmail or similar to rip it out of your provider. Each email could be individually encrypted, so you won't have to deal with a 500gb blob to sync.
I'm surprised Outlook held up. In my experience the program starts crapping itself after the first 3-4GiB of emails, and it only gets worse after that. I wouldn't rely on the file remaining intact for long with such a setup...
I remember services available 5+ years ago that would help you with this kind of thing (scanning through email archives by sender), but the ones I remember have all morphed into "tame your inbox" apps, which doesn't solve the same problem.
Unfortunately Protonmail is not good for long term mail storage. Their web mail app has hardly improved in years, and it is abysmal in terms of search and handling thousands of emails. If you depend on PM, you may find some years later that your emails are trapped and incredibly difficult to access except painfully individually, with much manual effort.
I use Outlook to access it on my work PC, the Android app on my phone, and the web interface elsewhere. Seems quite usable and painless, to me; even search.
But then, I fastidiously organize my email and so I don't need to rely on "smart" , privacy violating, deeply intrusive search.
I’ve been using Protonmail for years, with many tens of thousands of emails, and this does not match my experience at all. It is far, far easier for me to find old emails sent to my Protonmail account than to my old Gmail account, which seems to randomly decide that some emails shouldn’t be searchable.
Interesting, because I had exactly the opposite experience. My 70,000+ gmail account from 2004 is still easier to find things in than my 10k email account on PM was before I gave up.
I use my own domain and gmail for phone access, but I download all my emails to Outlook via imap. I have about 20GB of emails in outlook (my entire life's emails basically) which are instantly searchable.
Indeed if you are willing to have all your emails downloaded to local disk, but that's really inconvenient if you want to live with disposable hardware and cloud-based storage.
I agree 100%. Used ProtonMail for a while and this is an issue that's made me think about looking to migrate elsewhere. Tutanota had similar problems when I messed around with it last year. It is hard to find one with good UI, my needed functions, while still having a solid security reputation.
What is the advantage of using a provider like Proton Mail versus using a client to make a local back up of important Gmail labels (or regularly using Takeout to back up a email label with your most important stuff in it)?
Another example of why we need public internet services that aren't run by private companies. Imagine if your mailing address was run by a private company and they could take your mailbox, erase your address, and forever prevent you from receiving mail sent to that address ever again.
Every human deserves an email account, linked to if not publicly exposing their real identity, access to which is not revocable except by court order.
> linked to if not publicly exposing their real identity, access to which is not revocable except by court order.
Not too sure about that. There are some pretty poorly behaved people in the world that like hurting people for various reasons (including none.) I'd rather things stay on the anonymity side.
Phone numbers are just sequential numbers, that are assigned to carriers, when consumers transfer numbers the carriers just re-assign ownership via an assignment swap.
An email address by contrast is an undefined/minimally defined identifier in front of an @ and the message is just thrown to the domain to do something with.
Which is to say, mobility is impossible, because there's no cross-vendor standard for the identifier part and even if there was, both parts make up an email address which would send it to the wrong vendor anyway.
It is like having a phone number that ended with a network specific postfix and using it to route at the network level. It would make phone numbers non-transferable too.
At least here in the UK, phone numbers are generally network specific - including mobile numbers. Companies don't just reassign ownership, the original owner of the number has to actively forward calls. This causes some issues when a provider goes out of business and Ofcom or whoever have to call around and ask nicely for someone to take on forwarding for their number ranges. (There's talk about fixing this with a big central database, but I don't think it's come to fruition yet.)
Well, Google would be required to eternally hold your email address available for you and forward any incoming mail to another email of your choosing while also allowing you to send email via another provider (SMTP relay).
I am not fond of suggestions to break up big companies, but I do believe that FAANG should be treated as utility companies and not be allowed to deny service to anyone; any termination decision should be left to an independent 3rd party, ideally a public authority, so the big company will not be liable for any account misconduct.
The spoon might be the most extreme part of that picture, but I wouldn't blink at seeing 90% of those in a kitchen - how are brits supposed to cut meat?
It's hard to keep track because they keep encroaching on knife ownership.
It's illegal to sell a knife to someone under 18! As a Canadian, I owned a half dozen pocket knives by the time I was 10, and took them camping and so forth.
It's illegal for an adult to carry a knife without good reason! I carry one on me all the time, because I often need one.
It blows my mind how far down the authoritarian rabbit hole they're going, rather than addressing the root causes of violence.
At least if a US public authority decided to suspend his husband's account, he could issue a FOIA request to get the documentation explaining why it happened. If the FOIA is rejected for national security reasons, that'll be explicit. Public records laws and regulations don't apply to a big company like Google, so they can stonewall you forever and not have to explain what their policies are or how they were enforced.
Public authorities are at least theoretically accountable to the public, unlike a billion-dollar megacorp which isn't accountable to any force on this planet.
OK. And when the public authority is the one that issues the gag order to the company, which is what usually happening in these stonewall cases, then what?
Currently the companies never explain their decisions, so we cannot know if there was a gag order.
A public authority is required to reply to requests unless there is explicitly a gag order. Of course the reply may be _the account is disabled as part of ongoing criminal investigation_ but again, once everything's done they will be required to disclose information.
This is why I pay for Amazon Photos as well and use double the data/time to upload to both. I don't want google's AI or employees nerfing my entire family photos archive.
Fairly light evidence of a similar problem with Google. Even if so, at least I have photos in two clouds and I would guess there's little chance of losing both accounts concurrently. And Amazon customer support can be reached.
This is a fine example of why one should NEVER use a free closed (source or company) service for critical life or business functions.
They can and sometimes will shut you off with no reason given, no access to your data, and no recourse (& NO, appealing when no charges are specified, and no info or reasoning for their decision other than "yup we confirmed you violated our TOS", is not recourse, even in a Kafka world).
This guy can get nothing even though he works at Google.
It isn't like these major companies are short of funds to provide actual customer service, they just refuse to do so, basically saying "what are you going to do about it?".
My Dad has all his photos on a PC and HD backup. If something happens to him I know I can recover it all, I'm glad he doesn't rely on Google Photos, dropbox or similar.
Unless the disk is stored offsite then better install him some simple automated backup anyway. I keep such in case of theft or fire, hope it is never needed.
Since you're bringing up the idea that perhaps the ban was legitimate, it really does need to be mentioned that one scenario here is that the user did actually fail to comply with the terms or policies.
But even if this were the case, it is pretty unfair to not at least know what you are being accused of.
I use OneDrive, iCloud, a couple HD for backup of my stuff. I also have duplicate of my OneDrive and iCloud stuff on another storage in case both company does something unexpected.
They show me a text saying that to log in, I have to give them my phone number. Well, I don't want to give my phone number to Google. When I signed up, it was not stated anywhere that one day they might hold all my data randsom and blackmail me to give them my phone number.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] threadGoogle allows this for GSuite at $5/mo I think.
I guess they get the same treatment
i.e. Google's unlikely to hand over the dossier they've assembled on 'what your husband has been up to that we considered bad enough to shut down their account'
Most definitely not saying this isn't a false positive - but the handling process for it it must assume it's a positive.
Now why the poster's husband can't get the info - that is somewhat worrysome.
- it's weird to be mistreated by your employer's own product (just the irony bend to it)
- if you want to appeal after a dead end, your choice is to make a huge public PR nightmare, or try to make an internal post/plea that gains traction. you'd be doing your own employer a service if you could have this issue resolved without a PR nightmare
I was in a similar situation when I worked at Google. My brother kind of disappeared, and my family asked if we could at least check if he logged into Gmail. I asked and was told no, and I understood why -- it's up to my brother to share what he's up to, not Google. (My brother was fine; just didn't like replying to email or answering his phone.)
If you're not going to use that data when you get an opportunity like this to fix something, what's dogfooding and "trusted testers" all about?
It's sticking in your head in the sand out of a misguided attempt at being unbiased, instead of fixing things.
Companies serve the shareholders. Shareholders want to spend as little money as possible on user support. I think new regulations are a good way to solve this problem for everyone. US consumer protection laws need updating for the Internet age.
Both Google and Facebook have ridiculously poor levels of support for the money they make.
As far as I know, the reason no company divulges information like this is to stop the endless protests and appeals from people. Dealing with people who believe they've done nothing wrong even though they have is tiresome and expensive and the more information you give them, the more ammunition they have to protest.
The result is innocent people like (presumably) OP's husband getting shafted by a short email without any details, but it's finanicially unattractive to change the system so without court or legislative action I doubt Google will improve their services any time soon.
The Sixth Amendment applies to criminal action by the government. Google isn’t the government, and even if we were to pretend they were, they are neither applying a criminal law nor imposing the kind of punishments which are inherently criminal no matter how the law authorizing them is characterized, so the Sixth Amendment is far from applicable.
Were they the government, either 5th (federal) or 14th (state) Amendment due procesos rights might be an issue, but, again, Google is not the government.
The difference? You own the data on your own drive.
Personally ethics play a big role in my happiness, but I acknowledge and appreciate that being able to chose is a rare privilege.
EDIT: Grammar
With no new input from the user, how could anything change?
Has anyone tried "Try to restore" and had it ... work?
It sounds like they're at the point where they are supposed to contact a friend who writes for the New York Times, or similarly prominent outlet, to have a story written about their predicament.
This usually resolves the issue, but if it does not, they should run for and win a U. S. Senate seat, then forward the details of their issue on official Senate letterhead.
I thought it would be implied since GP was not serious either.
Couldn't figure out yet...
The reason is that despite being a corporate costuemer we don't pay enough to have access to support, and some issues we had, the only thing the FAQ and documentation did was redirect us to a page behind payment.
I self host email using the standard dovecot/postfix
Barring that. I still have my gmail account.
I had this issue a couple of times (with Comcast IIRC) in the early oughts (somehow I found myself on a RBL/DNSBL). I resolved that fairly quickly.
I haven't had problems since. Just to make sure, I implemented SPF/DKIM/DMARC in my DNS zones. And I'm sure implementing DNSSec didn't hurt either.
And except for those few times 15-20 years ago, my environment has worked like champ.
One assumes that it will require no more effort than when your Google account tanks or gets hacked?
Preferably, you should use your own domain (atleast for signing up).
Or use something like Tutanota [0], only for signing up for stuff. They have a very generous free plan. You should open it only to verify new accounts, and for 'forgot password' links.
[0]- https://tutanota.com
As a side question, to those who use google drive or similar, how do you stand it? I hate having to click through a bunch of dialogues to do stuff. Just being able to use a plain HTTP link is much better. I put stuff I want private in a directory that requires HTTP basic auth and it's so much easier. I can copy to/from on a phone by VPNing into my house and using a samba client. So much easier.
Use fastmail for email: it's best of breed outside of gmail. (This isn't damning with faint praise; it's quite good. Just not as good as gmail).
Use Arq for backup from your devices into google cloud storage or aws s3.
But as long as you're using an @gmail.com address as your digital identity, your access to all of your online accounts is tied up in that single arbitrary point of failure, to a company that does not view you as a valuable customer.
(Apparently that's coming this year! https://hey.com/custom-domains/)
It's run by the same company as Rimuhosting and Zonomi, if you're familiar with either.
Then the trust is placed in your registrar. Maybe that's where the trust should be placed from your perspective, but do note that you're still choosing to trust another organization who's interests may not totally align with yours.
The likelihood of loosing a domainname in my country (Germany) is fairly low unless you used it to actively (and provably) spread malware or commit other crimes (and your registrar will have to prove it and better hope they filed a police report, or their cancellation goes poof).
I don't upload any photos or other files anymore, though. The problem is that you can never fully trust those cloud providers to keep the data safe, so you need other backups anyways. I was thinking about using a more trustworthy service for off-site backups though.
Does anyone know an estimate of how likely this is to happen to an individual on a per year basis?
Obviously that risk will change as the organization changes, but if it's happening to a couple hundred good faith accounts a year I'd probably put it off for quite some time.
There's zero chance Google would ever volunteer this information, anything you see on here is probably a WAG at best.
I had exactly one Google account and I lost it - along with all data - too. So for me it is one out of one.
No reason given. They just don't let me log in anymore.
I would say closer to 70 million
I want to negotiate, but since you started with such a low number, it won't be worth it.
700 million people only from my country (India) would be a good start if you want to continue.
https://techjury.net/blog/gmail-statistics/
How small is the question.
I have cell service on Google Fi. Long, painful (still-ongoing) story short, they shipped me a Pixel 4a that had no cell service. I went back and forth with support for ten days. Then they shipped me a replacement phone. I confirmed my current address. They sent me a shipping notification for my current address. FedEx ended up delivering the package, no signature required, to a town I used to live in five years ago. I double checked and my current address is the only one on the account.
Going back and forth with support has been useless. I paid for a phone that doesn't work, and I'm being charged for service that I can't use. My last recourse is to refute the payments with my CC company....but that also seems like the quickest way to get my entire Google/YT/Google Fi account locked up because it's all tied together.
Yes, one of the places that I back up photos is google photos and I pay them $ for that.
I'm assuming you think that is an important thing to condition on?
I am not planning on refuting any charges that google gives me any time soon and would try and back up all of my data before doing that.
Even in a case similar to mine, visiting takeout.google.com before doing anything with billing is always a great idea :)
Say, if you can get into an annual plan, similar to what's there for hardware devices like Apple Care+. Just that, in this there is someone to help you through issues.
We used to pay 10% of our AWS bill for the AWS support plan because when you needed the help, it really made sense to have someone looking at it with some SLAs.
A second option is, Google can just make consumer Gmail as an ad free paid service and then provide support for it as well. Plenty of people are paying $10/month for email services, so we have a price point that works for people. Email is very crucial to online identity, and I would trust Google the most with security among the other providers so I would happily pay for it.
Edit: As someone pointed out, they have Google One at least for storage. It has proper support. Maybe it makes sense to extend it for other services as well. https://one.google.com/about
It wouldn't, because Google is averse to any kind of customer support even for paying services. Even the "support" people that get attached to highly paid YouTube, GSuite, and other accounts get regularly stonewalled like this person and cannot help.
The only solution? Make sure all of your data is always backed up somewhere else.
I'm basically down to email and some old Google Drives I need to clean out. Found a project in this thread that should help me with the Drives, just working on email now..
I'd happily pay for some sort of assurance -- "if you violate our TOS, we'll just put your email in receive-only mode" or something like that.
The other nice thing about this is you can be bob@domain.com rather than bob2746293@gmail.com and you can provide email accounts to your family and friends.
GANDI themselves once accused me of ToS violation because one account uses my initials ( as on my bank account ) instead of my forenames that they demanded. I migrated everything out of that account ASAP.
Ideally you need two completely different domains ( to avoid potential trademark issues ) in two different TLDs at two registrars.
You should have just put a full stop after that.
I've heard support is much better for GCP - but for me, the whole Google brand is tarnished, and because of my experiences with Adwords, I always choose Azure and/or AWS over GCP.
However the reps were pretty up front that as soon as a support issue crossed the line onto any other team at Google... you best just figure out a workaround, because even once we'd already crossed the threshold and had someone inside Google working on our behalf, there was just nothing that could be done.
And yeah, this has led me to be extremely resistant to moving _any_ infrastructure we care about to GCP. I have zero faith my account won't just be suddenly banned one day with no effective recourse. And I'd also never recommend any "paid support" option they offered like some people are suggesting they provide, because I'd have no faith in their support team being able to actually solve the sorts of issues that are hard for people to solve on their own.
Whenever there is a systemic problem, fixing the system is always a better solution than trying to fix individual behaviors. Backing things up is a good idea but that doesn’t fix the problem, it just helps mitigate some of the effects of the problem.
If you insist on using Google, keep backups elsewhere. You cannot rely on them for support (although you might be able to get it, don’t count on it).
I found it easier to move everything to Office 365. Google Takeout can export all data directly to OneDrive without having to download anything.
This right here is amazing and describes very well the moment in time we are living in. When using a Microsoft file format is [righly] considered the "open", "friendlier" option it really means the alternative [Google] is terrible. Microsoft used to be the Evil Borg that had everything proprietary.
Want support for working with AWS? The more you pay the better it gets.
In my experience, people transfer money to other people in exchange for items or services, and vice versa.
Storage is paid, so I assume support is available.
https://medium.com/bling-financial/google-has-threatened-to-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17494518
I suppose I could roll my own solution, but frankly I get tired of maintaining my one-off projects like that after a year or two.
Wiki mentions Gmail having 1.5 billion users. Imagine even 100M of them paying $100 per year. Makes Gmail a $10B product just on paid subscriptions, that is not a small amount.
Are you saying the software to perform the syncing costs more than a few dollars per month?
The operational costs could be more than that per user if you want regular updates. That's disregarding engineering time.
You also don't want it to be VC backed because such businesses will not be worth billions. (and if it will try to become such you will have similar problems as google)
Only in the event that Google locks you out, at which point you can create a new backup elsewhere. If Google has a copy and you have a physical copy, then Google would have to lock you out at the very same moment your house burns down for you to lose any data.
Regardless of where you store your personal data, the proverbial buck always stops at your desk when it comes to assuming responsibility.
Paying someone else to store your data gives you someone to hold accountable to what happens to your data. But that accountability is always limited and doesn't dismiss you from managing that relationship. For instance, the other party is still entirely free to bring terms and conditions to the table, which are meant to mitigate liablity as far as the party which will host your content is concerned.
Put more succinctly, even when you rely on a cloud service, you're still on the hook to assure safety and backups of your own data.
> I suppose I could roll my own solution, but frankly I get tired of maintaining my one-off projects like that after a year or two.
Yeah, I'm gonna prod you on that one. :-)
For e-mail, you could run an script once a month that harvest all your e-mails over IMAP and roll them into TXT, HTML, EML,... whatever. You could go for one big file, or discrete files. You could even pain yourself and fit everything in an mbox file. Roll everything in a ZIP or TAR ball. Then you'd store output file in whatever service you want.
You could spin up a VPS, provision the entire thing and set up a script that does all that as some service or cron job or whathaveyou. Now you've got an entire stack to take care off. Not what you want.
Maybe this is a good use case to go serverless. You could string something together using AWS serverless. Write an AWS Lambda in Python or Java. Should be one single script. Store your e-mail backups in S3 or somewhere else.
The idea of such a solution is that it just runs in the background and it runs in a robust fashion with not too many moving parts. So, here you have something running indefinitely as long as the bill gets paid. Or amazon doesn't cut you off. But at least you've now got your e-mail mirrored on two independent services, which is marginally better then where you are right now. The only other major constraint here is being able to restore your e-mail from that backup in case of disaster.
Otherwise I recommend using your own cloud storage buckets and/or a local NAS to store your data. It's easy enough to backup and sync across all of them now with various tools and services.
Support and customer experience is an afterthought for Google. They probably don't set out to be cruel, but they're very cavalier about incidental casual cruelty.
Tutanota was the one service I found that let you add (IIRC) arbitrary amounts of storage to your plan, but I found their web interface to be kinda clunky, and let the account expire. I keep wanting to look into this again, but never get around to it.
There's no official Linux client, but there are open source ones that perform well.
You could drop your mbox onto a OneDrive sync and then use fetchmail or similar to rip it out of your provider. Each email could be individually encrypted, so you won't have to deal with a 500gb blob to sync.
This is what it took:
* Connect to Outlook and sync locally
* Sort All Mail by sender
* Delete All Mail per senders that aren't important
It took me a day, and I'm glad I did it. Not that painful. Outlook was a champ through the whole process.
Now I can move somewhere else, which I will.
I remember services available 5+ years ago that would help you with this kind of thing (scanning through email archives by sender), but the ones I remember have all morphed into "tame your inbox" apps, which doesn't solve the same problem.
It's fairly easy to extract your data.
I use Outlook to access it on my work PC, the Android app on my phone, and the web interface elsewhere. Seems quite usable and painless, to me; even search.
But then, I fastidiously organize my email and so I don't need to rely on "smart" , privacy violating, deeply intrusive search.
My gold standard is mutt with its powerful and fast search filters (gmail is a serious downgrade).
Protonmail's lack of search is crippling.
Email export ... I don't even want to think about.
With a paid account it is trivial to export your emails as well: https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/export-import-...
[1] https://beta.protonmail.com
I still use a Google account for my Android phone, but my PinePhone should be shipping in a few weeks.
I'm done with Google. Good riddance.
You have no effective recourse should Google Googleify your Gmail account.
Every human deserves an email account, linked to if not publicly exposing their real identity, access to which is not revocable except by court order.
Not too sure about that. There are some pretty poorly behaved people in the world that like hurting people for various reasons (including none.) I'd rather things stay on the anonymity side.
Phone numbers are just sequential numbers, that are assigned to carriers, when consumers transfer numbers the carriers just re-assign ownership via an assignment swap.
An email address by contrast is an undefined/minimally defined identifier in front of an @ and the message is just thrown to the domain to do something with.
Which is to say, mobility is impossible, because there's no cross-vendor standard for the identifier part and even if there was, both parts make up an email address which would send it to the wrong vendor anyway.
It is like having a phone number that ended with a network specific postfix and using it to route at the network level. It would make phone numbers non-transferable too.
https://www.foxnews.com/world/british-police-station-mocked-...
It's illegal to sell a knife to someone under 18! As a Canadian, I owned a half dozen pocket knives by the time I was 10, and took them camping and so forth.
It's illegal for an adult to carry a knife without good reason! I carry one on me all the time, because I often need one.
It blows my mind how far down the authoritarian rabbit hole they're going, rather than addressing the root causes of violence.
https://www.gov.uk/buying-carrying-knives
Public authorities are at least theoretically accountable to the public, unlike a billion-dollar megacorp which isn't accountable to any force on this planet.
A public authority is required to reply to requests unless there is explicitly a gag order. Of course the reply may be _the account is disabled as part of ongoing criminal investigation_ but again, once everything's done they will be required to disclose information.
What is different about Amazon?
https://www.businessinsider.in/retail/furious-customers-say-...
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121022/07340420786/amazo...
They can and sometimes will shut you off with no reason given, no access to your data, and no recourse (& NO, appealing when no charges are specified, and no info or reasoning for their decision other than "yup we confirmed you violated our TOS", is not recourse, even in a Kafka world).
This guy can get nothing even though he works at Google.
It isn't like these major companies are short of funds to provide actual customer service, they just refuse to do so, basically saying "what are you going to do about it?".
It's a Devil's Bargain, and too many buy it.
Seems plenty of people around here think it is a good idea to leave critical functions to a company where you are the product.
Edit: minutes later some upvotes too, so controversial, it seems. If there's a counter-case (other than convenience and "low" risk, I'd like to see it
Google banning accounts stories is usually a one-sided thing. Who knows if Google had a very good reason to ban his account.
But even if this were the case, it is pretty unfair to not at least know what you are being accused of.
One day they just stopped letting me log in.
They show me a text saying that to log in, I have to give them my phone number. Well, I don't want to give my phone number to Google. When I signed up, it was not stated anywhere that one day they might hold all my data randsom and blackmail me to give them my phone number.