Ask HN: I'm a small business and Google locked me out

[CoreSet]

I'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.

I can't get a hold of anyone at the same time that my email is more important than ever. Google suggests to "contact their support, may take 7 days" even after I successfully entered the phone 2FA and a recovery email code.

Every day I'm locked out things get worse.

Does anyone have any tips for contacting Google, maybe talking to a human being?

Thank you HN

[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.

[gambler]

>A few year back, I got locked out of my primary gmail account due to a 2 factor authentication SNAFU. I was never able to recover it.

This is the downside (or hidden cost) of 2FA that most security experts purposefully ignore, because they work for companies like Google and only care about account security rather than user security.

[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.

[LockAndLol]

Do you still use Google?

[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?

[BlackJack]

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

[dang]

All: it's understandable that commenters react with generic indignation about how things shouldn't work that way, but please let's not pile on a user who's trying to help another user. It stacks up into the wrong incentive. After doing this once or twice and running into a buzzsaw of protest, who would want to it again?

Also, these comments appear mechanically and interchangeably every time the topic comes up, which means they're not the greatest for intellectual curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

[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.

[folli]

As respectable as your involvement in the situation is, this is exactly how it's not supposed to work.

It seems that the only way for a small business to get in contact with someone at Google is to raise hell on social media (or HN) and to wait for someone to take mercy on you.

[zerr]

Why you are not hiring proper support staff?

[marketgod]

You are an awesome person.

[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.

[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?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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 ;)

[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.

[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.

[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

[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)

[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

[mathgenius]

Startup idea: backup your google everything.

[ijidak]

I recently learned about takeout.google.com to backup your Google everything!

So happy they provide this service!

[icedchai]

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

[kujaomega]

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

[candiodari]

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

[TheDesolate0]

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