The only way to get hold of a human at Google
My GMail account has been disabled.
"Unusual Usage - Account Temporarily Locked Down"
"To keep our systems healthy, Google has temporarily disabled your account. This primarily occurs when we detect unusually high levels of activity on your account. In most cases, it should take one hour to regain access. In rare cases, it can take up to 24 hours for access to be reinstated."
It's been at least 10 hours (Gmail app on my iPhone shows "last updated: 5/22"), and going "welp, you're fucked, wait a day to get your email" is not an acceptable answer. All of the "help" forms have no contact information and no other way to get in touch with someone, so I'm putting out the "hey, Google employees who read HN, tell me who I can talk to about this" bat signal.
I haven't changed my email use patterns at all in months; the message occurs on a browser in incognito mode, I don't use any extensions, etc.
On a more general note, on what planet is "you don't get any email for a day and have no recourse, and we won't tell you why, or let you do anything to fix that" an acceptable action?
UPDATE
At 10:20, my account magically unlocked itself (I did nothing between posting this thread - my iPhone started dinging like crazy and then I could log back in) and is now working again, without anyone waving the magic wand. So, if you run into this, just know you only have to go 10 hours without email, instead of a whole day. I have been using my personal domain for most mail for a while, and this has just prompted me to accelerate that process to at least be able to maintain backup ways to send/receive mail.
I do still hope this thread stays up for a while, primarily so that the workflow around these account lockout messages gets better. It's fine to lock accounts out for security reasons, and I understand that algorithms have problems. That said, there should be more details of what they think triggered the algorithm, and a way to remediate it. If they think it is unauthorized access, try to auth with n+1 factors instead of the n normally required, etc.
187 comments
[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadBecause next time it might be me and by then Hacker News might have grown weary of these kind of posts and I won't be able to get the necessary attention.
Nothing. I repeat - nothing - is pushing me to move away from dependence on Google products more than the fear of this happening.
If there were additional authentication methods, or if it even just stopped you from sending mail (if they thought activity volume were too high), that would be... better, at least.
I agree that it would be nice if the free accounts had this option too but having been inside the chocolate factory I can also see why this is not practical.
It is also not something which most people have heard they should do. It also requires you to be something of a power user to even understand. Many people are so far into this mistake that it would take time and even more technical expertise to dig out.
My suspicion is that your immediate response will be to change the subject, most likely along the lines of "The problem isn't the temporary freeze on the account, it's the lack of communication." So I'd like to preemptively point out that you didn't make that case in your original argument.
These flames get really tiresome.
Why lock him out? Wouldn't it make the most sense to let him get in and change his password?
If your answer is 'because the spammer/bot might change his password', realize it would be impossible to detect a spammer/bot before they start spamming, so once the bot has your password, it can login and change your password before it starts spamming. But most bots don't seem to do that.
Or lock the account such that no new email can be sent, but email can be received. At least then you aren't locked out of your archive for the last X years of your life.
PR-wise it might be a tough sell, but I think a perfectly acceptable answer is a pay-per-incident support line that connects to someone who can actually fix my problem.
Of course, they would have to provide support to the support providers, but that would be a much smaller, more knowledgeable population.
No!
Why or why not?
Because I'm still left without a service that I may be using for something important. Maybe I've got a deadline coming up and I need to access my emails, who knows.
The problem, IMHO, is not that the account was locked. I'm perfectly cool with that, if thats what it takes to rectify whatever the problem was. The problem is that there is no way to contact Google about it. So lets say it was important to me to access my emails for whatever reason and I find my account locked because it was compromised. I now have no way of fixing this. No way of getting at my data. No way of even knowing why it was locked. If I could call Google up on the phone and they told me "oh, your account was compromised" at least I'd know whats going on. They then could work with me to at least provide me with access to my data while I wait for them to fix the problem and get my account restored. Or they can tell me to change my passwords or whatever it is I should be doing.
Right now all you get is "we locked your account, good luck, mwuahahaha".
I too am feeling a very strong force to move away purely out of necessity - I can't have the very crux of my online identity under constant threat of being completely destroyed on a whim with no guarantee of getting it back.
Google might be reacting to similar?
ON a planet where you get high-performance email services for free, apparently. I feel for you, but the lack of personal response (IME) doesn't mean that your communications are being ignored, just your need for a response. This is still far from ideal, but typing out responses take time away from simply fixing problems.
If you pay for gmail storage or an apps account, then obviously the above doesn't apply.
There is no way to communicate with anyone or to even raise an alert of "hey, I have a problem". The only way that it is going to get fixed is for someone to manually intervene, and the only way to make that happen is apparently to complain loudly here until a Google employee waves their magic employee wand at my account.
Claiming Gmail (even the free one) doesn't work when, in fact, it experiences seemingly random and very infrequent outages, is disingenuous. It's incredibly hard to make a complex application like Gmail work perfectly all the time for all its users and I'm completely sure they are well within their ToS. Much like we are willing to live with software that has some bugs, we must be willing to live with services that aren't always there.
Buses stop, rails need maintenance and your plumbing sometimes fails. Life continues.
On the planet where you're the product rather than the customer?
The financial truth of 99% of their business is that users to the extent that they look at ads. And since ads aren't worth much individually, people must look in large numbers.
All the people I know at Google are great folks, and they sincerely want to serve users. But customer service is expensive. So is writing special-purpose code for weird edge cases.
https://www.fastmail.fm/pages/fastmail/docs/pricingtbl.html
What are the chances your account was hacked and is now being used to pump out spam? Turn on two-factor authentication if you haven't already, once you are able to get back in.
If their system is locking out enough people who shouldn't be that they would become overwhelmed, google is doing something very, very wrong.
I highly suggest you use two-factor authentication with GMail:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/advanced-sign-in-secu...
Or Jeff Atwood's post on this:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/04/make-your-email-hac...
Your email is too valuable to be left open to attack, hijacking or theft.
After taking baby steps like sounding like one cares more major interventions like actually caring may be called for. (I enormously respect the Googlers who I know that that line will discomfit but this is criticism that you guys have gone out of your way for years to earn.)
Are we talking about the same email service? You know, the one that's supposed to be so awesome that you'll quickly forget about getting your email the "old fashioned way" by having to mess with those pesky things like setting up a POP/IMAP account on your host provider?
Talk about things coming full circle.
[Addendum} No, haven't had my email hacked. I guess I was a little blow-hardy, thanks for responses :)
I, for one, appreciate the fact that 2FA is available with the service. Everyone should have it turned on for any high-value mail account they own, Google or no-Google.
https://ripe64.ripe.net/presentations/48-AbuseAtScale.pdf
1 million+ bogus authentication attempts per day, 60-100k auths per second (legit and not), etc.
If they want to come up with a two-factor auth, I'm happy to provide the public half of a PKI keypair. Of my choosing.
Not my phone number, thanks.
My real email is too valuable to be left to GMail.
This solution does not require you to give them your phone number :).
So if your address is jsmith@gmail.com, you can send email to (or login with) j.smith@gmail.com or jsmit.h@gmail.com.... at least until someone registers jsmit.h@gmail.com!
I was an early beta GMail user have a reasonably common first initial last name GMail address. I probably get 3-5 password reset attempts per month. I also routinely received a variety of interesting misdirected emails. Everything from someone's VPN credentials, a US military EEOC complaint, invitations to a stag party in Ireland, a video of a paratransit bus flipping over (intended to be sent to an investigator), to girls modelling underwear for boyfriends.
Uh, if this is true it's a security abomination. I'm pretty sure Gmail doesn't allow registration with a login that would be considered the same as an already registered one (but I'm too lazy to check a few to confirm, just because I refuse to believe Google could be that dumb).
But anyway, paul responded so it's a moot point.
Good thing to remember this when writing a system that compares email addresses--always normalize Gmail addresses on the backend before processing--but woe betide you if you normalize on the frontend, people love their dots!
In other news: Someone else's blog is under my Blogger account, and there's absolutely no way to contact Google about it.
The new credo of doing business is HIDE FROM THE CUSTOMER. It's disgraceful.
(Perhaps coloring my perception is that I have a pay-as-you-go phone currently.)
I'm pretty sure Microsoft waives the fee for their paid TechNet support if the problem was due to a legitimate bug or problem on their end.
Here are instructions: http://gmailaccountrecovery.blogspot.com/
http://analytics.blogspot.com/
That does not prove gmailaccountrecovery.blogspot.com is an official blog though.
Edit: for clarity
It's very unlikely that this site is affiliated with Google.
Very soon the word gets out that HN is where you can get your Google bullshit problems fixed and we'll be treated to pages-upon-pages of people with Google problems.
The general issue is that of account suspension or closings without any recourse. It seems that the most damage is being done in the AdSense/AdWords ecosystem.
I've said this before, with the introduction of services like Google Drive, one has to really think hard before jumping in with both feet. If you have your email, documents, advertising, revenue generation, file storage and other important services with Google you might be risking a lot. At the present time you have to assume that all of those services could evaporate and go "poof" overnight and you'll never know why. That's why I don't use any of them. I have better things to do with my life than to have a heart-attack because a Google algo decided to shut-down my business and cut me off from all of my data.
Seriously, Google, Larry, Sergey, this is embarrassing (and evil).
An analogy: "Hey Tom, I'm not using this rake any more. Would you like to have it? I'll give it to you."
"Sure Dick. Thanks, this is a very nice rake indeed."
The rake breaks.
"Hey Dick. The rake doesn't work any more. Come over here and fix it."
"Sorry Tom, I can't do that. I'm busy raking my lawn."
"I hate you Dick, because you are evil."
It's been said numerous times in this thread -- if you want support, you pay for it. If your email account isn't important enough to you to pay for it, then you don't really have much grounds to gripe if it breaks.
I don't see how that makes anyone evil.
That's no excuse to provide a shitty service. For 99% of people GMail is not shitty and is infact quite awesome. That doesn't change the fact that with the amount of people Google has, not having even a queue for people to get minor issues fixed (Freaking MICROSOFT can get this right, for crying out loud!!) is ridiculous.
In my opinion, the thing done wrong was offering support through unofficial channels. It sets the wrong expectations and perpetuates the notion that if you know the right people, you'll get the support that others can't, and honestly don't deserve.
If I give rakes out to 100 people, should I have to hire staff to fix the ones that break? No. I gave them something for free. If they don't like it, they can go somewhere else. If they buy a rake, then they'll get a warranty, and be entitled to speak to a human about it.
To your point directly though, it IS an excuse to provide shitty service, if they did that. As you said, it's beautiful and perfect for more than 99% of their customers.
But is it really "free"? No.
They parse your emails so they know what you are buying/selling, who you are talking to, what sites you have a membership on, etc. They also use Gmail to display ads (based off of the things they learned from your emails) to make money off of you. They probably do other things i'm not even thinking of right now. So is it really free? Not at all. Is it a great source of information about you (to then be used by them to target ads at you)? Absolutely.
They should be providing support for it. I don't know what that support should look like (be it a call center, forums, etc), but I definitely think that if I give Google permission to snoop through my personal email so they can build better ads for me (which is how they make the majority of their money) I expect some damn support.
There are google groups, message boards, support forums, HowTos. There's even Prioritized phone support that you can apparently sign up for.[1]
It's not as though they hand you the source code and a note saying "Good luck."
[1] - http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a...
Are there any? (Not snark, I genuinely don't know of any.)
I agree that the gmail economic model might not be feasible if support costs were included. But I don't know that numbers so my agreement is not important.
If 99% of users have no problem with google's services currently then, X% have no problem with google's services in the future. I'm not sure how to solve for X.
Also, as I recently discovered, Google does have a for-pay phone support service for Gmail users, as well as all the other forms of support they offer in the form of message board, how tos, google groups, etc.
"EASY COME, EASY GO
Gmail is a quick and dirty email service for people who don't really need reliable access. Please do not bother signing up unless it does not matter whether you lose the address and all your email."
I think that would begin to resolve the problem being highlighted here for sure.
OTHER THAN AS EXPRESSLY SET OUT IN THESE TERMS OR ADDITIONAL TERMS, NEITHER GOOGLE NOR ITS SUPPLIERS OR DISTRIBUTORS MAKE ANY SPECIFIC PROMISES ABOUT THE SERVICES. FOR EXAMPLE, WE DON’T MAKE ANY COMMITMENTS ABOUT THE CONTENT WITHIN THE SERVICES, THE SPECIFIC FUNCTION OF THE SERVICES, OR THEIR RELIABILITY, AVAILABILITY, OR ABILITY TO MEET YOUR NEEDS. WE PROVIDE THE SERVICES “AS IS”.
If they put that right on the front page in big letters, replacing the current brags about how awesome it is and how it makes your life easier, then that would filter out most of the users who are clueless enough to get in serious trouble this way.
Like big nasty warning messages on cigarettes.
Of course that's not helpful to Google, but if Google can't be expected to look out for public interests at all then it isn't anyone else's business to look out for Google's either.
Does it break sometimes? Sure. What doesn't?
Does that make it a smelly pile of crap? I don't think it does, and I don't think most people would agree that it is.
Gmail is a really awesome service that doesn't have the best support. Period. If people can't be bothered to look at the terms, or if they have greater expectations of the service than they should well, that's on them. I don't think circumstances are so dire that they should plaster "Really, we suck" on their homepage, especially as they're better than all their competition that I've seen.
If it is or were the case, that Gmail is not even supposed to be reliable, then might be very pretty and convenient as you please (hence, not a smelly pile of crap, as one might believe from the terms) but still ultimately bad for most people. Particularly the people who are least equipped to judge the risks or recover from the mistake, because IMAP is Greek to them.
So even as apology for Google I think this is a fruitless line of argument, no disrespect intended. I do respect your opinions.
My own feelings are more nuanced than what I think you are probably fighting hardest against (round condemnation of Google as evil, or Gmail as unusable). I personally think there are safe and constructive uses for Gmail, cigarettes, hard liquor, cars, pornography and pistols and informed adults should have ready access to all these. But I think as a matter of personal conscience it's better not to be a dick, and it's better long-term business, and I'm not against leverage being applied to make Google iron out this procedure or be more firmly up-front with the scary disclaimers that probably should be scaring away people who are not wise consenting adults. Again assuming that Gmail is operating on this sort of Libertarian-style principle that they are not even slightly and socially obligated to provide reliable service no matter how much they promote the product for wide and general use.
I do happen to think that Gmail is an exceptionally good mail service, though that is obviously just my opinion. I think statistics would agree that it is a fairly reliable service. Reliable enough that it doesn't need to be disclaimed as "We're just messing around here really" on the home page. Nor am I willing to necessarily concede that it is 'bad for most people'.
In a nutshell, I would say that it's a great service if you can agree with its terms. This isn't mail that people are generally paying tons of money for, and I think their expectations are out of sync with reality. The general argument I hear is "BUT MY LIFE IS IN THAT EMAIL". If that's the case, gmail wasn't probably the email service you were supposed to be using, at least not for free, in the same way I don't store my valuables under the rock in the garden. If it mattered that much, you shouldn't have entrusted it to a service that didn't have a support policy more in line with your expectations.
I have gmail, and I'll concede that it would be inconvenient if they turned off my access tomorrow, but I keep all my more pressing correspondence to services that I have a good-faith belief will give a shit if I lose my information. If google apps were shutting people off, I would expect people to be upset, and I would not consider that ire as meritless.
My only real complaint with the post you've just made is the assertion that Google doesn't care to provide any service whatsoever. If they didn't care about providing reliable service, then it probably wouldn't be so reliable. I personally have experienced maybe two or three outages since I joined the Beta however many years ago. Those were global outages, or at least wide-spread. That sort of thing generally doesn't happen any more. In addition, it's not as though swarms of people are having their accounts disconnected every day. We keep bandying about the 99% number, but I really suspect that it's probably more like 99.99%, but that .01% is enough people that we still hear about it.
Some of this is opinion, and some of my argument is diminished by Google's people support in general, but I think it's getting short shrift because of these rare occasions, and I think that it's considered on the same scale as when Paypal freezes someone's account, which I think is unfair.
http://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Help-Logging-In-en/brow...
Also, I don't know anything about this, since I've never used it, but in looking at my account options on the 'Help' page, they have a "Prioritized Phone Support" that it seems you can pay for: http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&a...
The moment that agreement becomes invalid is the moment a person has the right to become frustrated.
Google (read their terms) reserves the right to mine your communications for information that they then sell to advertisers. You're doing THEM at least as much a service.
There are terms for something that works 99 days but on the 100th day makes you feel like gotterdammerung.
They are a crappy service, fails QA 101, never trust google and i'm switching my email to something else
You're certainly within your rights to feel that way, and if you do, I certainly encourage you to migrate to something else. If that's really how you feel though, I'm guessing you already would have unless... just maybe, the service is better than you admit.
The risk means that even if Google provides the service free, it still can have a cost for the user that can be very high depending on the importance of the emails the user is locked out of.
It also means that the cost is invisible 99% of the time, which is why people keep using Google services. After all, most companies that offer network services mitigate the risk for the user by allowing the user to contact them for help if things go wrong.
For example, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft both allow you to purchase support. However, Google seem to only provide support when they decide to invite you to it.
In my personal case, my main email of 16 years is becoming increasingly spammed. I needed to find another email to migrate to, and decided to try out Gmail. Gmail has failed my evaluation.
And while it may not be "evil" to provide no support for a free service, it does raise question marks for anyone who looks at a free service to get some idea of who they'd be interacting with on upgrading to paying.
As usual, if you don't like the service, vote with your dollars. If the service is so indispensable that you need them despite their failing you in some way (like not having support) then well, that's the discriminator. You can 'pay' for support by going elsewhere to a service that won't perform as well, which may cost you money.
Also, for what it's worth, I agree that they probably could provide support, and that Google in general is bad at it. It is easily their weakest area in my opinion. I only responded as sternly as I did to combat the 'evil' allegation, which seems to be bandied about any time Google does even the slightest of negative things.
[Dick comes to the door of Tom.]
Dick: Hey Tom, I see that you don't have a mailbox. I have a few hundred extras down the street, would you like to use one on the condition that I might analyze who is sending you mail and the like? It's really secure and it's all the rage in the city you can store 2000 pounds of mail forever blah blah blah. You should really use it!
Tom: Sure Dick, it's a real help to have an address for bills, personal correspondence, etc. And I can use it to establish residency and so on.
[Tom puts the address in his letterhead, tells everyone to use it, makes several job applications with it, etc. He uses it for everything. Every service he uses authenticates him by his access to this box.]
[One morning Tom goes out to his box and sees it has been padlocked. After a great deal of searching, Tom finds an unofficial contact for Dick.]
Tom: Hey Dick, can you unlock the box for me? I am expecting a check, a letter from my daughter, etc.
Dick: Sorry, I can't do that. And I can't tell you why. What did you expect for free? Anyway, how did you get this number?
Though as I recently discovered, they do have phone support, and message boards, and google groups, and all that jazz.
I understand that I'm perhaps the outlier in thinking this, but Google is acting exactly as they said they would, and exactly as they always have. I don't see malice in that, and I certainly don't see 'evil'.
Found in my 'Help' link from GMail.
Apparently you have to have signed up for something else first.
I think the safest bet is to just give them your money for an apps account if it really matters, but that might be an alternative as well.
"Prioritized account recovery support is currently offered on an invitation-only basis for selected users."
So, no, this certainly doesn't fix the problem for a lot of us.
And for the record you could have gotten human support if you were a paying Apps costumer, for the free stuff you have to deal with automation.
It’s just the same thread with the same comments each and every time; “They don’t respect users”, “Their customer support sucks”, this doesn’t elevate the discussion on HN and shows the false sense of entitlement we all have even in regards to the free stuff.
Giving a way food to homeless people? You're getting the satisfaction of having done something good in return! That wasn't a free meal!
They also don't care because they are de-facto monopolies.
Amazon suspended my account 4 months ago. I'm just getting the $5K they owe me in money now. To this day, I still don't know why they suspended me (100% feedback and virtually no problems).
They shuffled me around their automated system with the result being that my account stayed suspended.
I was also suspended a couple of years ago from Google Adsense due to one of my scripts going awry. I wasn't clicking my ads, but It refreshed a page a bunch of times with Adsense ads on it.
If I try to signup with my name, I just never get any response back. This one was definitely my fault. I could just use my LLC, but I got out of that game ages ago.
http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/gmail
Have you tried that? I honestly never have and would love to know if those are actually efficient. If you haven't tried it, please do then report back to us.
(Note, I ask because the last time this happened on HN, several people errantly thought they had 2FA turned on when they didn't).
(Some days I wonder if I angered a stalker who downvotes everything I post... or if it's some darker HN sign. Sigh)
And yeah, I had 2FA on -- I was challenged appropriately logging in to GMail even, it was post-login where I got the "you're bad" page.
Gmail is a free service. Google allows you to use it for free, in exchange for being shown ads. You have access to the same infrastructure that paying clients use, and the same uptime, but without paying. You can download all of your data easily, and at any time. Nothing about that is predatory on the free users.
What would you say is the appropriate market "price" of 10-hour turnaround on emergency technical help? Having worked at a company that provided optional sub-24-hour response, I can tell you it's usually expensive.
If I need it because I screwed something up, that's a different (and irrelevant) discussion.
If everyone just their our money back (£0) and stopped using Google's services, they wouldn't have a business any more.
By using a service such as Gmail, we've trusted them and invested our on-line lives in them in order that they can monetise that usage and grow their business.
It is completely unacceptable when that trust is betrayed and they cut you off without recourse.
I guess I see OP's problem stemming from the existence of bugs/quirks/spam attacks. As a developer, I know these things are simply impossible to prevent with 100% certainty. I don't feel that Google is morally culpable for bugs or spammers, unless they are somehow adding bugs to the point of negligence.
In fact, as a developer, the idea of being morally culpable for bugs scares me, since that kind of implies I am doomed to be immoral.