
Ask HN: I'm a small business and Google locked me out - CoreSet
I&#x27;m the owner of small construction business and I need to get access to an old gmail for recovery purposes that Google has suspended for nonpayment.<p>I can&#x27;t get a hold of anyone at the same time that my email is more important than ever. Google suggests to &quot;contact their support, may take 7 days&quot; even after I successfully entered the phone 2FA and a recovery email code.<p>Every day I&#x27;m locked out things get worse.<p>Does anyone have any tips for contacting Google, maybe talking to a human being?<p>Thank you HN
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40four
A few years back, I got locked out of my primary gmail account due to a 2
factor authentication SNAFU. I was never able to recover it. I tried to go
through the appropriate support channels more than once. Filled out extensive
forms, even identified recent emails like they asked, to no avail. It was very
disappointing, considering I had spent a good amount of money purchasing apps/
games etc. with that account. What a waste.

Unless you get rescued here by a personal favor of a Googler, I would imagine
that account is good as dead.

~~~
zozbot234
2 factor authentication (w/ security tokens, mobile "apps" etc.) comes with an
inherent risk of getting locked out of stuff. Most of the time you can
mitigate that risk by generating "recovery" codes in advance, but it's still
something to be aware of.

~~~
40four
Yeah for sure, It was kind of my fault. It all happened very quickly, I think
2FA was relatively new at the time. I kept getting ‘recommendations’ from
Google to enable it to be more secure.

As a dutiful user I obliged, and downloaded the authenticator app. I think it
gave me 10 one time recovery codes, but of course I didn’t back them up
externally :)

I was having some performance issues with my Samsung phone at the time, and a
couple days later, did a factory reset. Then when it came back on and I tried
to log into my google account, my stomach sank to the floor when I realized I
could not get in without the authenticator app.

That was that. Everything gone. What an idiot :) Couldn’t even get on through
a computer without the stupid codes I could no longer generate. Answered all
the questions, identified specific emails, personal info etc. Google was not
impressed.

~~~
zozbot234
> I kept getting ‘recommendations’ from Google to enable it to be more secure.

Yes, this is problematic in itself. Hardware-based 2FA is not an unqualified
win; I definitely would _not_ want to use it without some _very_ robust
contingency plans of what to do if my authentication device gets bricked or
otherwise malfunctions.

~~~
40four
Agreed. The whole app based 2FA does not seem great in retrospect. I
accidentally bricked my whole account, by simple user error. That’s a good
point, that it could just happen from a hardware malfunction as well.

Seems like most 2FA these days is based on the service sending you the code by
text or email. Sounds like a much better approach.

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ehutch79
Why does everyone seem to be glossing over the fact they said 'suspended for
nonpayment'?

And it doesn't seem like they're trying to pay their bill, but just get that
one email out of the account...

Maybe google isn't in the wrong here.

~~~
mattl
Maybe that one email is the login info to their bank?

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inetknght
There are other avenues to deal with your bank.

~~~
zozbot234
Those avenues tend to involve being physically present at some bank branch (or
perhaps an ATM). Something that's not really feasible in the time of Corona.

~~~
irishcoffee
I mean, maybe? I call my banks to do all manner of things all the time.

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BlackJack
Please email me (email in profile) and I will try to get you support
internally.

~~~
jtwaleson
HN is the only place you can get Google support. Thanks for the effort, but
you guys should seriously fix that, and not by shifting into your "let's
automate this and do it smarter" mindset. It does not work.

~~~
sct202
I don't know why they can't just hire a bunch of people to take care of stuff
like this, like this is so ridiculous that I'm pretty sure someone could make
a successful start-up to pay Googlers to enter internal tickets on behalf of
people having issues with Google accounts/services.

~~~
glitchc
It’s obvious that Google doesn’t want to incur the cost of client support
staff.

~~~
luckylion
I'm sure that lots of people would be happy to pay good money for plenty of
support issues if that meant not having to use the terrible Google help pages
and issue forms, and not having to wait a week or ten for a response.

~~~
glitchc
Agreed. It's the main reason why I've refrained from using Google for business
activities, otherwise it would be a no-brainer. If something breaks, I need to
be able to call or email someone and receive a response within 24 hours.
Anything else is just not tenable from a reliability perspective.

~~~
v7p1Qbt1im
If you use Google services for business activities you‘d presumably pay for a
support tier. For the consumer side I suspect, with over 2 billion users, it‘s
pretty much impossible to offer human support at scale. That‘s not even taking
into account malicious actors that would use the support as an attack vector.
I might be mistaken. Is there an example of a company with that big a user
base which offers human support for everyone?

~~~
luckylion
I suppose you can argue users vs customers, but Amazon does a much better job.
Their support isn't perfect, it's off-shored, but it's still good enough for
most purposes, I think.

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cyral
Somewhat related... At our company we once deleted a G Suite account that had
a balance on its AdSense account. They let us delete the account with a click
of a button without checking if all the associated accounts for other Google
products should actually be deleted. So we received a letter that the account
was sent to collections, but there was no way to login and pay the bill
because the account didn't exist anymore. Eventually we got ahold of support
and had them link the AdSense account to another Google account so it could be
accessed. Theres a lot of systems at play with Google and I imagine stuff like
this is overlooked quite often.

~~~
gorbachev
Yahoo is/was the same.

I deleted my Yahoo (email) account, but they didn't delete the Yahoo Groups
account tied to that account.

I couldn't access Yahoo Groups, but I was still receiving Yahoo Groups
messages on all groups I'd set it to forward posts to my email or notify me of
things. No way to unsubscribe or change settings.

~~~
dhosek
Well at least now that Yahoo has shut down groups, that problem has gone away.

~~~
wtmt
It’s not completely shutdown. [1]

> On February 1, 2020, Yahoo! removed online access to discussions and all
> other features except simple membership management, essentially turning all
> groups into mailing lists.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Groups](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Groups)

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tyoma
How many other struggling businesses are facing the the same issue but don’t
know about the “get on the HN front page” back-channel to human tech support?

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dylz
> may take 7 days

This is one of the things at minimum that fends off takeover accounts from
people demanding immediate access and faking urgency, while also notifying all
associated accounts that someone is trying to recover access and giving them
time to respond.

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tschellenbach
We had this with one of our employees. Email was locked for 2 weeks due to a
bug on google's end. Was impossible to get support even if you have a paid
account and a relatively large team.

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madsbuch
A recommendation going forward: make sure to host emails on a domain you
control yourself. This will allow to change service provider for mail hosting
when they act like this.

~~~
wtmt
The OP is talking about a paid service, which I presume isn’t a gmail.com
address (otherwise why the suspension for non-payment?). To add to your
advice, just having an own domain doesn’t help if you don’t download and store
_all_ mails on a computer or other device so that you don’t have to resort to
a server to get older content you need whenever you need it.

~~~
madsbuch
Of cause it helps. It just doesn't provide your old mails.

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tachometr
Relying on Google for any business seems like potential suicide. When they
decide you violated whatever they come up with, you are basically fucked. That
is the reason why I never used Google+ - they were deleting people's email
accounts. I hope they won't delete my email because of this comment ;)

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gbenzzz
I've had this happen in the past. I used another GSuite account I had access
to to get a phone support PIN and actually got someone on the phone and then
kept calling back until I got a rep who would work with me on the account I
did not have access to.

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CoreSet
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU

I can't tell you how grateful I am. I'm actually a little emotional, thinking
of all the people who upvoted this post until it got in front of the people it
needed to (and thanks so much Aayush!).

God bless everyone on this site. You saved me.

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badrabbit
This. Unless you are big enough to have a customer engineer assigned to you,
as good as their services are I see people having similar issues again and
again with their lack of support

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RMPR
This kind of articles make me think that it must be a good decision to not use
2 FA after all. I originally disabled it to test aerc ([https://aerc-
mail.org](https://aerc-mail.org))

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itake
If you used a desktop or mobile app, they download a backup of emails locally.
If you're just trying to read an old email, you could check your phone or
computer's mail app to find the local copy.

~~~
minichiello
+1

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mathgenius
Startup idea: backup your google everything.

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icedchai
I back up all my gmail locally with "gmvault". I am not affiliated, other than
a satisfied user: [http://gmvault.org/](http://gmvault.org/)

~~~
alfehc
Sign in is currently disked - "this app has not yet been verified by Google in
order to use Google Sin In"

~~~
icedchai
You can work around it:
[https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault/issues/335](https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault/issues/335)

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kujaomega
Does Google Takeout
[https://takeout.google.com/?pli=1](https://takeout.google.com/?pli=1) work in
this cases? And does GDPR can be applied in this cases?

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candiodari
Doesn't Google takeout remain functional even for locked accounts ? You can
download anything in that mail account even when it's blocked.

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TheDesolate0
You might have to file a lawsuit and then you might be able to get it through
discovery.

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userm0d
This seems to happen more and more often.

