The only way to get hold of a human at Google

[_pghu]

...is apparently posting to Hacker News.

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.

[andybak]

And this time I'd like the outcome of this thread not to be just "A Google insider wandered past and fixed this guys problem" but "Here's how we're going to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Because 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.

[gergles]

Yes, I posted this because I've noticed that is what happens -- someone comes here and waits for a Google employee to wave their magic wand -- but I am well aware that people will get sick of seeing these on HN (and a company the size of Google offering products people rely on should not have the only contact method being "go to the secret club and say the magic word").

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.

[ajross]

So, just for the sake of argument, let's assume that the poster's account was compromised and being used to send spam. Would that change your analysis? Why or why not?

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.

[christiangenco]

Couldn't agree with you more. Until I started hearing about these seemingly random account cancelations I considered my google account my safest and most secure account (second only to my root login for my laptop).

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.

[cletus]

I'm sorry for the trouble you're having. I have on idea of what's happened and why but thought it timely to point out for the benefit of those reading this thread:

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.

[patio11]

cough If any Googlers are reading this, Google often phrases error messages more like that quote ("Us us us us us us, ergo, you don't get what you need") instead of like cletus did ("You you you, you you you, ergo, we're going to take this action on your behalf".). Dale Carnegie, Cletus, and every sane copywriter on the planet strongly suggest rewriting that prompt and related ones.

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.)

[scromar]

My wife has had two-factor authentication for at least a year, she only accesses gmail from her iPod touch and the browser on her laptop, and she had this happen to her about a month ago. No recourse. It came back eventually, but apparently two-factor auth is not sufficient to prevent this issue.

[gergles]

I am, of course, already using 2FA, but I completely agree that everyone should have it set up.

[Duff]

I think that the root of this issue is the stupid Google policy of not distinguishing any variation of your address if a '.' character is in there -- until someone registers it. People get confused and try to login.

So if your address is [email protected], you can send email to (or login with) [email protected] or [email protected].... at least until someone registers [email protected]!

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.

[dredmorbius]

Google's got enough of my info.

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.

[oneilse14]

And for all things not Google, check out http://www.duosecurity.com/. Completely painless to set up on my box at home.

[OzzyB]

Really? It is now a suggested policy to use additional authorization flows in order to use this email service?

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 :)

[ebiester]

And hope your phone isn't stolen, losing access to your email? That's why I've always avoided two factor authentication -- it's scary enough losing your phone, but then you're locked out of your email as well?

(Perhaps coloring my perception is that I have a pay-as-you-go phone currently.)

[nicksergeant]

I'd love to do this, but my Apps account gives me no such opportunity to setup 2FA, following those instructions: http://cl.ly/242v451j3g331U393u34

[donniezazen]

Their is no excuse for not using two-factor authentication with all Google products.

[DavidAbrams]

Or hey, get a real host, domain, and E-mail account.

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.

[robomartin]

This is a general problem with Google and their customer-no-service attitude. It's just deplorable. It really is. You have to wonder: What is it going to take for them to give a shit and actually do something about it?

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).

[bmelton]

Giving away an awesome mail service for free to the world is not evil. Being too busy to support every Tom, Dick and Harry that has problems with it is also not 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.

[anigbrowl]

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?

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.

[gergles]

I do pay for GMail storage, so the predictable parade of "WHAT DID YOU EXPECT FOR FREE?????" (answer: exactly what was advertised, a working email service) is tiresome -- and besides that, there isn't even a contact form for this issue.

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.

[wpietri]

> 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?

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.

[Matt_Cutts]

[redacted], it looks like this issue resolved itself; I'm curious, did you mention your email address anywhere on this page? I didn't see it mentioned.

I'm happy to ask people for more details. Normally when you have two-factor authentication on, I wouldn't expect you to see this message. So there might be some improvements we need to make on our side to try to prevent this from happening for other people.

[brudgers]

Matt, I think your message is consistent with the disconnect people feel when experiencing problems with Google services.

The root of the issue for the consumer of Google services is not a loss of email access (that's just the sort of technical problem everyone has when dealing with the internet). The issue is that there is no person representing Google who says, "I'm sorry you are experiencing difficulty, let me see what I can do to help you."

Google doesn't even go there on their own support forums: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/gmail/%22Ac...

There is a meaningful number of posts for the exact issue the OP experienced and what little assistance that Googlers provide is generally of the "you did something wrong" variety rather than "we're working on making it better."

[kyt]

Someone broke into my gmail account in 2009, changed the password, and I've never gotten it back. I tried to recover it using their standard form, but they ask all sorts of ridiculous questions like the day I started using gmail, the day I started using Google docs, etc.

[debacle]

Here's a serious question - how much would you pay per annum to be able to talk to someone when you have an email problem?

[gergles]

$50, the same they charge Apps users. You can't buy support for @gmail.com accounts.

[eli]

I don't know, but I'd be willing to pay a fair bit per incident. I suspect it would be well in excess of what it would cost to provide such support.

[alaskamiller]

There's actually a big support team for Gmail. For enterprise customers.

Here are instructions: http://gmailaccountrecovery.blogspot.com/

[dsl]

gmailaccountrecovery.blogspot.com appears to be unrelated/unaffilated with Google. The bottom of the page says "(c) 2012 Brett K. Carver". Also, blogspot?

[vibrunazo]

A 2 second google search for "gmail support forum" brought me to:

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.

[alanfang]

The Google support forum is a black hole. At best you'll get a canned copy pasted response from a Google employee that won't help you.

[insertnickname]

It isn't exactly news that Gmail accounts are closed for no obvious reason. I'm sorry that you're unable to access your e-mail, but at least now you've (hopefully) learned that Google isn't trustworthy.

[nilsjuenemann]

Do you using Chrome with these two extensions?

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mihcahmgecmbnbcchb... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ejidjjhkpiempkbhmp...

For me these combination made a request loop (response from gmail was 404 and 501) for some circumstances. As a result my account was temporary disabled ...

[gergles]

I do use Chrome, but no GMail related extensions (and specifically not either of those.)

[srik]

Someone must have gotten hold of your email+password combo. Mine got stolen once, Ive no idea how but suddenly all my friends started texting me saying they've been receiving spam mails from my account all of a sudden.

Google might be reacting to similar?

[donpdonp]

I agree its maddening to be locked out of gmail for no specific reason. I imagine the customer to employee ratio is a billion to one, so even if they had a ticket system, it'd be overwhelmed in a short amount of time.

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.

[gergles]

So close to zero as to be zero; my password is strong and I use 2FA. My account works on every other Google service but GMail.

[Karunamon]

>I imagine the customer to employee ratio is a billion to one, so even if they had a ticket system, it'd be overwhelmed in a short amount of time.

If their system is locking out enough people who shouldn't be that they would become overwhelmed, google is doing something very, very wrong.

[mayop100]

They do have support reps and a ticketing system. You have to pay for them though. I suggest upgrading your account when it comes back online so that you're paying for support.

[sp332]

Out of curiosity: if I set up a forwarding rule on my Gmail, and Google suspends my account temporarily, will it still forward my email?

[gergles]

Yes, it appears to still do that. I can also still access my account via ActiveSync on my iPhone (but not IMAP or the web interface.)

[bifrost]

This is why you should never use free email for anything you care about, and especially not GMail. I hate to break it to people but the PAID service is not better either, you're just paying for what you used to get for free...

[bobbydavid]

The vitriol regarding Google's services is unjustified.

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.

[antihero]

Nope. Completely untrue. They benefit from us using their services. We are doing them a favour by choosing them over others - their business is built upon people using their services.

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.

[gergles]

Well, that depends on why I need the "emergency help". If I need it for their problem, then I expect it for free, given that I am already "paying" for the service with my ad views and my personal data.

If I need it because I screwed something up, that's a different (and irrelevant) discussion.

[slurgfest]

I shouldn't need emergency technical help. If they want to provide a reliable service which I can use to convince them that I should be allowed to access my own data, that would be really swell and should not require full blown tech support nonsense.

[Urgo]

I travel fairly often and most of the time when I travel I remote into my machine back home so I'm many times logged into google services from those two locations, then throw my android phone into the mix as well and my webserver which uses google api's linked to my account as well. All in all I have tons of connections to google at any given time.

A few months ago I was flying home from a trip and was using the in flight wifi. As soon as I landed though at my connection city and turned on my phone I quickly noticed things weren't working. I tried logging into services and my account was disabled for some reason. I of course started freaking out since I have so many things linked to this such as my suplemental adsense income. I filled out a form assuming it'd go no where.

I wasn't able to accomplish anything before boarding my next flight. Before take off I had the inkling to try the recover password option. To my surprise after doing that and having it txt my phone I was able to change my password and magically my account was unlocked.....

Anyway I know the OP already fixed his issue but just wanted to share this story. If you ever get locked out saying your account is disabled try the recover password option as a way to unlock it....

[gattler]

Sigh when will people finally wake up and understand that Google, Yahoo or Facebook are Advertising companies. Anything that isn't affecting their really big clients in advertising isn't getting any sophisticated support and even that area of business might be maltreated in respect to professional support. And don't be shortsighted here. IT absolutely -needs- support. So if you really wanted professional support for emailing you have to go to a tech company that doesn't earn a living with selling your Browsing history to other parties or worse.

In case of an email product I did not find anything yet that would serve my professional needs. The only really 99% reliable thing yet has been renting a root server (or using my own machine with DynDNS) with a nice swell Postfix/Dovecot install. The Internet was invented as decentralised, if not even distributed technology. Buying in (you buy with your cookies) a centralised technology like FB, Google or Yahoo, even if they are in the cloud or in the edge - it's still one vendor, for me was always against the economical philosophy of the Web.

If you don't have the knowledge how to set up a distributed email node (if you allow me calling it that way), I would recommend lavabit.com, they are reliable and non-commercial (However also subject to the patriot act b/c located in the US).

And not only the Internet with its industry-raped non-standard HTML language, its ridiculous insufficient Border Gateway Protocol or its patchwork 7bit/8bit e-mail MIME protocols is one heck of an enormously cool hack, also the Web can be nowadays.

If you don't get any support from cookie traders like Google or even Ghostery, why don't go self-made and install a distributed Social network like GNUSocial? The Internet used to be a business opportunity for everyone, don't let it get destroyed by monopolies, that block inventions with 15 year-old patents.

[sparknlaunch12]

I have heard this happening a few times. However I thought you can register a mobile number to help resetting your account password?

[gergles]

It isn't the account password; I can log in fine, it's just that I immediately get redirected to the "bad boy" page.