Anybody know any good, tested practices for reducing the risk of your Gmail/whatever getting blocked? Do you think if you don't use it for social purposes, don't buy or sell from Google services with it, always log in from nonsuspicious IPs in the same country, etc, that your chances of a ban will be significantly reduced?
Tested practices: Nope. Nobody can tell you that because it's Gmail's secret sauce to handle abuse, spam, disagreeable people, etc. Even if you follow a 20-point protocol to secure your account, there's no guarantee that Gmail won't block it and never allow you to get it back. It doesn't really matter if your email address is not sending spam or not logging in from random IP addresses from different geographies or is always accessed from the same devices and same browsers.
Good practices:
* at the cost of your privacy, connect/link one or more phone numbers to your account so that you can use those for recovery. Gmail values phone numbers more than recovery email addresses.
* setup 2FA with a TOTP app or with the Google app on your smartphone or with a hardware key.
Best practice: Ditch Gmail and use any other paid email provider that provides customer support. Life is too short to suffer through Google's shenanigans and lack of customer support. The more you allow Google to surveil you, the higher the risk that some random event could trigger an opaque ML algorithm to flag your account for some violation and all forms of support will stonewall you with no help whatsoever.
No, that's the exactly problem. Nobody knows why they ban accounts. And once an account is dead, it stays dead, no matter how much bad press they get (see the guy that sent a photo to their doctor). I've seen well described in another comment: it may as well be a guy that throws darts at a list of usernames
