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ASK HN: Google account disabled. Oh what to do?

70 points by axod ↗ HN
On friday I woke up to find my google account had been disabled. No gmail, no adsense,adwords,webmaster tools,blog etc etc. No reason given.

I've filled out the forms, got an automated response which is totally irrelevant - ("If you have forgotten your password...") etc. Now I'm trapped in an email conversation with what seems to be an auto-responder which is just quoting stock emails at me with more irrelevant 'answers'.

Has anyone been through this? (Looks like a big yes http://search.twitter.com/search?q=google+account+disabled) Does anyone know the best way to get it resolved, or who to contact?

Google seems to have lots of things sorted out, but surely there is a better way of dealing with this sort of issue. I would happily pay for a premium google account to have some sort of support for this eventuality (Even though I'm paying them via adwords already).

Any help gratefully appreciated...

57 comments

[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 75.5 ms ] thread
dcurtis
It's pretty amazing how utterly terrible Google's customer service can be.
SwellJoe
They try. A friend of mine is on the GMail team...they do, in fact, very frequently go above and beyond the call of duty, given that it's a free service. And, people who pay for it do get more attention (probably more attention than $50/yr warrants in many cases).
xiaoma
It's free in the sense that any other ad-driven media is. Don't forget that Google is making massive amounts of cash from Gmail, though.
mattmaroon
Are they? From free users? I've read that it doesn't monetize very well.
vaksel
the reason is probably related to adsense, they probably think you spammed-clicked ads on your site.
axod
Looks more likely to be someone trying to hack the account. I found 3 "password reset" emails for the account had been sent to my backup email. I'm assuming the person probably tried 100 passwords or something, and google disabled the account.
matt1
Unrelated, but I saw from your previous submissions that you built mibbit, which I use frequently and think is great. Hope all turns out well with your Google problems...
axod
Hey thanks... The silly thing is that I can't even update the mibbit blog right now, as it's using my google account on blogger. I think I'll be moving that very soon.
jyothi
This happened to me once. I guess it was because of "'Account Lockdown: Unusual Activity Detected'".

I was using a different account for my adwords and used to login on multiple accounts from the same box or simultaneously use gchat with one account, adwords editor with other and open mail in yet another one.

Result : My account was blocked for a day and I felt cut out of the world. This is how I felt - http://umangjaipuria.blogspot.com/2007/03/what-does-google-k...

I went through the same frustration, just had to wait for 24 hours.

You can try this if you haven't already - http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=46346... Pick Not listed then I think 1. unusual behavior and 2. certificate issues could be a cause.

tectonic
I hope this works out for you. Please let us know what happens, this is one of my fears about being so reliant on Google.
illume
Wow, that sucks :(

I'm going right now to back up all my google stuff!

Oh wait a minute... there's no backup button.

litewulf
Gmail has IMAP. Google Docs has an export feature. Google Reader lets me export my subscriptions.

It'd be nice if they had a one click export that'd send you a tar with all your data ever, in every reasonable format, but that's not as easy as it sounds ;)

alien_acorn
Is there a standard format for storing email? I would like to archive all my mail using Gmail's IMAP feature, but what happens when I want to find something in 30 years? For example, I'd think that an Outlook data file would not be a good choice.
litewulf
I used to use Linux mailspools, or whatever, but I really don't know nowadays what's cool. I just use both the Vista email client and Gmail. When one of them fails, I'll just upgrade/try another one.

Data preservation is hard.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
SwellJoe
mbox and Maildir have both been around for years, and will be around for years to come. Both are easily converted into each other, and there are many common tools for reading and writing them. Most major languages have APIs for working with either spool type.

mbox has been around for at least 20 years. I don't know if it will be around for 30 years, but it's such a simple format, that I'm sure you could deal with it in 30 years even if no tools still commonly use it--you can open it in a text editor and make sense out of it without any parsing, at all, for example. (MIME encoded messages are much harder to parse, and can contain infinite other formats, but the actual email is always gonna be easy to get at.)

litewulf
hfwang@google.com

Send me an email with whatever your username is (but not your password ;) I'm not a phisher). I can try to poke someone and see if I can learn anything, but no guarantees.

PS: Also use http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/request.py?ara=1 if you haven't already. I've heard that sometimes it helps, so it can't hurt.

kahseng
somehow I think I know you ;)
litewulf
oh, hi!

a pity you went to the dark side ;)

kahseng
on this thread, i'm not so sure about that :) never knew you lurked here.
matt1
Great, but what about all the people who don't use Hacker News?
SwellJoe
I thought everybody had a friend at Google. I've been in the valley too long.
litewulf
Look at it this way, I've read every page on the internet (how do you think the crawler works?)

If you complain about it online, I'll be there ;)

In seriousness: I don't know. I try to be helpful about these sorts of things as a sort of pay it forward kind, where if I ever have problems with a large faceless corporation I hope someone will step in and help me out. I tried to do the same when I worked at startups (and especially there, few people know someone who works there).

This is obviously inherently unscalable, but in many respects, tech support is as well. I don't know what the plans are (this seems a pretty big pain point for everyone), and I'm sure people who do know can't talk about it...

I'm not sure what you want me to say. I care deeply about some of the products I work with/use (not just Google's mind you), and as much as possible I try to help out people when they're stuck. Broad policy changes are outside of my control, and I apologize for that.

marcus
Here is a policy change for you to consider/champion.

How about not blocking an entire account for an infraction in a single field. If someone did something wrong with their adwords account block their adwords not their email. And if someone sent emails you suspect are SPAM don't shutdown their blog, just disable sending emails from the account...

dcurtis
Would be nice to have a warning also. "Hey, you're doing X and if you don't stop, we'll disable your account!"
ivank
Facebook does this.
litewulf
I know nothing about abuse protection, but I think they don't want to do this because it would reveal how the abuse detector worked.

Imagine if everytime you changed your website, you'd get an email from Google saying "I liked this change" or "I didn't like this change" (aside from being utterly creepy), it'd make reverse engineering the whole thing trivially easy.

litewulf
Also: if anyone else runs into problems, let me know. No guarantees that I can fix anything, or even be able to answer your questions/talk about what triggered the account problems though.

And also: sorry. I know it sucks. People at Google know it sucks. I'm pretty sure people who are directly involved in this stuff are thinking about it.

PS: Oh god I hope I don't drown in email ;)

axod
Email sent. Thanks for any help you can give :)

Hopefuly there are some clever people working on it. The things I take issue with are:

1. No reason is given... (In my case I actually saw some password reset emails sent to my backup email. So I assume someone was trying to force access).

2. All logins are frozen - my own fault for using a single google login for lots of things - youtube,blogger,adsense,adwords,gmail etc - I'm locked out of them all, for the simple reason that google told me it'd be "easier" to use my existing google details to login.

3. No human support... Canned response emails with a line "We will investigate" 48 hours later just doesn't cut it.

Like I say, hopefully the top teams at google are looking at this one. It's really a way to kill paying customers. I'm seriously going to take this as a big lesson myself.

bayareaguy
Wouldn't now be a good time to consider ways to lessen your dependence on Google?
sown
b-b-but...THE CLOUD!!!
axod
Agreed. And I also see the point about not relying on a single google login for several of their services, even though they encourage you to. Resist the temptation and create a separate account seems like a far better idea...
mattmaroon
There's a very helpful Firefox plugin that lets you switch between them easily. Google's cookies cause you to keep logging out and back in otherwise.
axod
Ah cool. Presumably this is not against terms of service? I know you're only allowed 1 adsense account which sort of sucks - what if you own a couple of sites and want them separate...
bkbleikamp
solution to make this less painful if it happens to you: setup a script (i have a python script) that uses fetchmail to pull your gmail everyday after a certain time (i use 9pm since most of my emailing is finished after 9pm).

worst case scenario you lose 24 hours of emails.

tocomment
Could you write up a tutorial on how to do that? Getmail also looks promising but the config section of it's documentation is like 12 pages long. I just want to backup Gmail, dude.
bkbleikamp
This is ironic, but...Google it :)

Also getmail is easy to install with MacPorts.

axod
Well in this case I've also lost the ability to login to blogger, youtube, adsense, adwords.

This is one massive argument against unified logins for a start.

crabl
Happened to me twice this (read: last) month. I'm beginning to think that I shouldn't rely solely on GMail.
Whiteeagle
Cloud not looking that good on a rainy day
louislouis
I would suggest signing up for multiple gmail accounts to spread the risk a little. (a bit like how u should be doing with banks accts atm).

I have about 6-7 gmail accounts. I have FF, IE, Safari, Chrome and Opera installed to manage them all as one browser can only store one gmail cookie at a time.

litewulf
Gmail Manager is your friend ;)
louislouis
thx, I was using that before.but it didnt work as well as I'd hoped so I gave up it. Hopefully they'll release better versions in future.

This Prism from Mozilla (as recommended by dmaclay) looks very promising for FF.

[dead] visakhcr
better, you can have different profiles on Firefox for each of the Gmail accounts and open the corresponding ones when required..i keep a different account for my adsense and when i want to check the reports, i use that particular user profile in Firefox..
dmaclay
use Prism from mozilla - you can run multiple instances, each with a different gmail account.
louislouis
yeh man, I'll be sure to check that out. Thx!
sown
This is the sort of thing I worry about cloud services...it's not that I don't already do this at home on some level with an ISP but what kind of freedom (if you pardon the use of that term) in computing do we have if Google/Amazon/MS just decides to not care for me on that particular day? Or they get (easily) convinced that I may have committed some kind of a crime (they don't even have to know what now days in the US).

Sure they care if they do this to a lot of their customers all at once because of some kind of hardware failure or outage...but there's the uncertainty of their customer service. They already have my money do they really have to care or just kinda sorta care?

You can throw around words about free markets and choice all you want but once they got your money they cease to care. See cell phone companies.

I still don't like it.

blasdel
This has happened to me about once a week for the last several months!

All I have to do to unlock it is solve a few captchas, wait a few minutes, and try again. I'm guessing that after they put in the infrastructure to make it easy to unlock your account, they got a lot more trigger-happy about locking them in the first place.

matt
Ugh, just happened to me too. IMAP still works for what it's worth..
brahms
I have a second gmail account to which all my mail is forwarded. I've its password sealed in a safe, and never use it. I don't see the need to store the backups myself, google certainly has it covered. I mean, it's google... right?
jasonkester
Lame. This happened to me with my Yahoo mail account. Twice.

The first time was way back when Yahoo first launched mail. They actually lost EVERYBODY's accounts at one point early on, and you had to sign up again. That was acceptable back in 1996!

The second time was 3 years ago. Account gone. 1000s of important mails lost forever. Yahoo doesn't have any form of customer service, so weeks of emailing them did no good. Worse still, a couple years later when Yahoo bought Flickr, there went my Flickr account and all my photos.

I'm glad to see that Google employs real human beings that read their email and care about things like this!

budu3
Wow this is scary considering how much I rely on gmail.
hbnickcarter
Just had an exact repeat episode…account disabled. I my case its because there was a security issue with Google Checkout…the worthless redundant buying service that I signed up for to get 10% off some gear. What a fool. The Googlesphere is inherently evil and here’s why. They promote trust that lures users with awesome free cloud computing service. I foolishly trusted Google and used Gmail, Docs, and Picassa to safeguard my data. Now, because of some BS Checkout problem, they’ve locked me away from my data. IMAP made the situation far worse, since I now have lost 3-years worth of email data. INSANE. I blasted the cheerleaders at Lifehacker who promote all things Google. I suggest that anyone who suffers a similar fate do the same. The word needs to get out that Google can’t be trusted.