

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

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.<p>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'.<p>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?<p>Google seems to have lots of things sorted out, but <i>surely</i> 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).<p>Any help gratefully appreciated...
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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.

~~~
matt1
Great, but what about all the people who don't use Hacker News?

~~~
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!"

~~~
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.

------
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.

------
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.

------
bayareaguy
Wouldn't now be a good time to consider ways to lessen your dependence on
Google?

~~~
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...

------
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.

~~~
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.

~~~
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.)

------
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.

------
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?

------
Whiteeagle
Cloud not looking that good on a rainy day

------
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...](http://umangjaipuria.blogspot.com/2007/03/what-does-google-know-
about-me.html)

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...](http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=46346&topic=12783)
Pick Not listed then I think 1. unusual behavior and 2. certificate issues
could be a cause.

------
vaksel
the reason is probably related to adsense, they probably think you spammed-
clicked ads on your site.

~~~
mickt
It's for that reason I use a non-gmail account for my adsense account.

Consumerist has a few articles about this, but they don't offer a solution:
[http://consumerist.com/consumer/complaints/gmail-disables-
us...](http://consumerist.com/consumer/complaints/gmail-disables-user-
accounts-without-reason-or-warning-250295.php)

------
davidw
I had a similar experience when attempting to transfer ownership of a domain I
purchased through their 'apps' system. It doesn't seem possible, and the
canned answers are horrible:

<http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/09/23/caveat-emptor-dominium>

------
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.

------
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.

~~~
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!

------
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.

------
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!

------
matt
Ugh, just happened to me too. IMAP still works for what it's worth..

------
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.

------
crabl
Happened to me twice this (read: last) month. I'm beginning to think that I
shouldn't rely solely on GMail.

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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.

------
budu3
Wow this is scary considering how much I rely on gmail.

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thras
Maybe Google should outsource their customer support. The Vatican has a
billion customers and answers everyone who calls them up without the use of
any machines (even the guy who calls in every day claiming to be _Saint_ John
the Baptist): [http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-
phonenun...](http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-
phonenuns28-2008oct28,0,4468154.story?track=rss)

~~~
alien_acorn
Google would be more responsive if we were tithing.

