Google, especially Google Corp, is very much that way too. One of my users is currently getting a fair bit of spam because a spammer figured out that if they send a message with envelope sender @google.com, rcpt @gmail.com, google.com MX will accept it, then bounce it with NoSuchUser and gmail will accept it. I spent an hour yesterday looking for a way to contact Google about it, but couldn't find anything. Made harder because most things assume you are talking about gmail or youtube, not google.com itself.
It's pretty shameful that these large companies have no real way to contact them.
> It's pretty shameful that these large companies have no real way to contact them.
Along the same lines, I think organizations shouldn't be allowed to send out email but not receive email at the same address, e.g. noreply@. That's just hostile in general.
I've been slowly migrating logins off of a @gmail.com email and onto an email at a domain that I own/control for this reason. It's tedious and feels a little like an overreaction (presumably the odds of this happening to individual users are pretty low). On the other hand, the thought of some faceless fraud algorithm deciding that I should no longer have access to the credentials I use to log in to my bank, investment accounts, DMV, etc and having no real recourse beyond posting on HN and hoping that a sympathetic employee reads is pretty scary.
(I didn't want to actually host my own mail stack, so I just have a custom domain set up with fastmail and point the MX to them. Their UI is great and a breath of fresh air compared to gmail. I guess they could in theory decide to lock me out randomly too, though I trust them to have actual customer support and can just point the MX somewhere else in the worst case)
> It's pretty shameful that these large companies have no real way to contact them.
There was a thread on reddit from an escort who was on a podcast talking about how she was banned from instagram and facebook (for promoting her escorting!) and the only way she was able to get her account back was to seduce some high-level meta employees via linkedin, date them and then convince them to reinstate her accounts.
I saw these spam mails start showing up a few months ago, and I was like WOW how is google infra just letting nefarious actors use their own domain to bounce spam/fishing emails?
Hey I’ve been getting these sketchy Delivery Status Notification (Failure) emails too with my gmail handle but @google.com
“ The response was:
The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. Please try double-checking the recipient's email address for typos or unnecessary spaces. For more information, go to https://support.google(.)com/mail/?p=NoSuchUser”
Then it has a phishing email copied below trying to look legitimate.
Can I create a filter to block this spam for good? It’s been happening for over a year now and makes me think one of my emails failed to send so I jump to open it ugh.
> It's pretty shameful that these large companies have no real way to contact them.
It's sadly all too common these days for companies to have no general customer support, only forums full of powerless volunteers. It's even started to become that phone support lines don't have anyone on the other end anymore; Microsoft for instance basically just has an LLM on the other end that waits for you to talk, then tells you to fuck off to the powerless support forum.
I've been getting multiple of those a day too. It's pretty annoying. I'd love to treat them the way other junk mail gets treated but I don't want to inadvertently end up auto-binning legit mails from GMail or Google in the process.
It gives scammers more plausibility too. If the top hit in a web search is Google's support page, which gives no phone number, then scammers can get race to get the number two hit with their number...
> It's pretty shameful that these large companies have no real way to contact them
This is by design in order to prevent any meaningful path to having to manage user complaints. Companies, broadly, used to have teams of customer support people and you could call and someone would answer to route your issue. That still exists in a lot of family run business (trash collection, home services like cleaning, custom parts etc…) but is frankly extremely rare for the majority of corporate interactions.
That’s not coming back because it’s clear that having a black hole for service saves money and doesn’t prevent repeat customers because there’s no real competition in any market, in a way that would bring customer support back.
If they can't figure out the problem from there with you description then they are just incompetent and you shouldn't be doing business with incompetent companies no matter how large or popular they are.
You should bring everything you rely on in house as much as possible if not possible then on business that has an incentive to work with you. If you can't afford to then question if your product is really providing value. Why anybody with greater memory than a goldfish would build on top of a google service is beyond me (probably just people falling for ads or propaganda) it's no different then building on known vulnerable software.
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me 297 times (+ all the soft killed services without adequate support) , shame on me!
I lost my facebook account about five years ago--total outright account ban. No recourse at all. It happened to a group of about 10 people that had been administrators of a local non-profit's facebook page and who had managed groups for the organization in the past. Our non-profit was non-denominational and helped local teens with after school type programs. We never knew why our personal accounts were banned. Best we could figure was that we used a tagline in the past in some facebook comments and posts that later got co-opted and spread by a "white power" group in the USA. We were located in Canada.
At the time, some people recommended buying an Occulus device and calling their support because they were able to recover accounts and they had human support. We tried appealing to the company on social media, but we didn't have any luck.
I had to rebuild my social media profile and our organizations profiles and I lost 14 years of Messenger conversations, posts, and photos. These memories were just gone. It sucked. For the non-profit, it meant lost donations and lost connections for our alumni. Keep your own content off-platform.
Buying an Oculus actually did allow me to successfully restore my wife's Facebook after it was hacked, thanks to finding probably the same thread you're referencing.
The amount of emotional capital held in various platforms is terrifying when you consider how easy it is to be locked out.
I now regularly "takeout" all of our actively used platforms and store them on physical media.
I registered an instagram account to share my art, and was banned entirely, immediately, before I could even upload an avatar, with zero explanation. I emailed several times, did the license scan thing, and even messaged support from my personal account, and I still have never gotten any sort of explanation.
shrug This and that other thread today about Slack just seems to be what happens when you're determined to remove as many humans from your processes as possible.
> At the time, some people recommended buying an Occulus device and calling their support because they were able to recover accounts and they had human support. We tried appealing to the company on social media, but we didn't have any luck.
This is one of the weird things about social media; it can be extremely valuable to people, but there's no way to actually pay the company providing it for the privilege of having a fair manual review from customer service.
The internet has been like this forever. In the 90s I was banned from hotmail for having an inappropriate email address because my last name is Cummings. No recourse for some idiotic regex filter.
100%. These large social media companies are very capricious about what counts as breaking their rules, will kill your reach at the drop of a hat and will fold under the slightest bit of pressure from someone richer/better connected than you if the latter has any issue with your work or existence at all.
Gotta own your own platform to make sure you have a backup when that happens, and have at least some control over your own audience.
Having your own site on someone else's corporate service is no less of a risk of being shut out of your account. Free speech is only as free as the service you are using thinks it is.
I'm not sure if that's still a thing but I remember period where companies were using their fb profiles and messenger to provide customer support. That gave me shivers back then.
Back when the internet was a nice place, I mean years 1999-2010, it was full of websites managed by individuals. Each site was different, some were pretty-hideous, quite frequently with unusual knowledge and curiosities. It was so much fun to Google them (Google was a damn good search engine back then too). Most people knew how to use FTP to upload a basic HTML page.
Now it's an expert level knowledge, especially amongst younger generation. Private websites are nearly extinct, thanks to (and not only) Google and SEO cancer.
Corporations like Meta are scared of people taking control over their own data, so they put lots of effort into making the content creation process as brainless as possible.
Unrelated to reproductive rights, but my private Instagram account got suspended for community guidelines violations out of the blue & I lost all access to my old photos, my friends, contacts, years of DMs. I don't have the slightest idea what triggered it (and of course they won't tell you), nor is there apparently any way I'm aware of to appeal. Interestingly, I still have access to meta[.]ai for whatever reason, so I'm wondering if there is some way to talk to it to get out of InstaJail, or finding a prompt to get it to give you more info on who to contact or ANYTHING at all.
However, after hunting around on reddit for solutions, I was quickly made aware of underground groups of individuals (hackers? I'm not sure what you'd call them) who offer account recovery for up to 1 to 2 grand per instance. These aren't just the people who send you phishing messages claiming to get your account back, but offer full services such as promotion, getting unbanned, having other users banned and etc.
We've seen news reports in the past where individuals or groups get backend access into Meta and then offer these sorts of features. [1]
But who else has access to these sorts of tools & features? I wouldn't be surprised at all if Meta moderators or employees are making a very nice side hustle for themselves doing this, as they'd have not only the access, but presumably know how to hide their tracks.
Just a theory. Anyway, if anyone has any ideas on getting an Instagram account back or filing an appeal or whatever, any info would be appreciated.
These are not hackers but Meta employees/contractors who make money on the side by using their access to internal support tooling/channels. It's a fireable offense (it's only intended for actual friends/family) but still happens a lot.
This is pretty much the case for non-abortion, non-political situations, too. For example, MMI, a small watch company out of Singapore, had their Facebook page removed in the middle of one of their Kickstarter campaigns earlier this year.
To anyone on the outside, it's not clear at all if (a) there really was some kind of issue that consumers would want to know about, or (b) their page shouldn't have been removed to begin with.
It's not only (I'm sure) annoying to the company, which, being small, has responded in a relatively circumspect way, but annoying as a consumer because it's not very easy to interpret the signal.
In the same ballpark, but reverse, my news feed always has one or two posts from maybe fake groups that have seemingly AI-written stories that carefully mention the Tedoo app, and FB is all too happy to let that slide no matter how many times I report it as spam...
Content is one thing. But it gets me really concerned about these kind of appeal processes when it comes to more critical things like your identity or proof of personhood.
It is not hard to imagine getting a black mark in some invisible proprietary profile that determines if you can access Uber Eats, LinkedIn, etc. and have no recourse to fix it or get another chance.
It's not just Meta. All big tech companies (including Amazon, if you are a vendor) have gotten infamous for basically only getting a human to intervene with automated moderation or outsourced lowest-effort moderation if one raises a big-enough stink on social media or manages to secure a court judgement, but even that isn't foolproof these days. Twitter has recently gotten under fire for ignoring German court orders.
Yep. It's why the only way most people get their hacked YouTube channels back is by begging the Team YouTube account on Twitter for help, and hoping enough people bother the staff there that something actually gets fixed.
If you're a popular creator that doesn't have much of a social media following, friends at Google or lots of lawyer money, RIP any chance of getting your channel back before/after it gets banned due to the hackers.
I feel like this is a cultural value pretty common among modern companies, where the "proper channels" is a broken system and we have to work around it. We've seen it often, where the only way someone will get support requests looked at is by commenting here, on Twitter, etc. Once a furniture company wasn't really taking action on my warranty claim until I commented about it on a promotional Facebook post.
I had a weird and painful experience like that with Reddit, where my account and 10+ years of content all vanished one morning for no reason... but its "appeals" webpage insists that my account is in good-standing, so therefore I can't submit any kind of request for help.
A real hard wake-up call on the importance of owning your own online identity and content.
Firstly - Hah! this is the easier situation! This is Americans talking about reaching out to Americans. It’s even more fun when you are in another country, and need to go through your network to get attention to an issue.
Secondly - Everyone I know, who is in a T&S team or does content moderation hates this situation, and is glad that this is being highlighted. it’s considered unfair and absurd. Getting recourse because people know someone who know someone to get it to the right team, is NOT how things should work. Let alone at global levels.
I can give maybe a smaller firm or platform a pass. But at FAANG scales? Cmon.
——
This is also a reason why I think that Reddit dug its own grave, back when it found the testicular fortitude to oust moderators during the API black outs.
If a firm has the willingness to remove mods and craft new philosophies of engagement when the bottom line at risk - does it magically lose that capability during the remainder of the financial year?
I had a Youtube video account with I think two videos. Got a notice it was suspended for content violations (these were self-created videos with no copyright content). Asked for reinstatement. Nada. This was years ago. On a lark recently decided to ask again. Got approved. Have no idea why/how/what/who/etc.
The big LLM players are getting in on the act now, too. In May 2025, out of the blue my account with Anthropic was auto-banned. Your recourse? Fill out a Google form to appeal and wait. Over 4 months in, I’m still waiting. Early on, I did manage to correspond with a human called “Destiny at Anthropic” but now they’ve put up some AI chatbot. The answer is always “wait.”
At scale, the value of individual users approaches zero.
Apple's "iCloud Keychain" API lets Facebook and other apps track you across multiple devices and even device resets, because it's tied to your iCloud account. There's no way for a user to see or delete that secret data, except asking and trusting those apps to delete it.
This "exploit" has been there for years.
I only ever used throwaway accounts on Facebook, just to access some services that were only accessible via FB. At some point FB banned my account. I created a new one on the browser. Worked fine. When I signed into that account on my iPhone: instant ban. Delete FB app on iPhone, reinstall FB, try new account, same thing. Try a new iPhone, same iCloud account, new FB account: instant ban again.
They can not only track you across app reinstalls, device resets, but also across multiple devices. And Apple facilitates it.
There's a post on HN about someone being banned from Facebook because they violated (supposedly; who knows what violated even means) Whatsapp TOS from 3 years prior (possibly even before FB acquisition)
Someone needs to tell Zuckerberg about this thing called "antitrust" and not being a dick and that you can't run your company(ies????) like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
Same with bugs. Reporting bugs rarely seems effective anymore. Maybe my use-cases are more unique, but sometimes I stumble upon things where there the bug I encounter is 2 years old with 0 responses from the company, but I don't know how many comments from customers.
And it's already a hassle to report, so actual amount of people encountering the issue is probably higher.
One example comes to mind... I can't ask my Google Mini anymore to ping my remote. Many reports. Nothing from Google.
I got a panicked call from my parents when Facebook deleted my brother's profile, probably 5 or 6 years after he passed away. After looking into just trying to get the profile restored, I came to the same conclusion as the title essentially. The "memories" feature frequently shuffled posts and pictures of him and had become a comfort for them. They bring it up every now and then, maybe some day I'll find a way to sort it out.
I bet they have a team of people whose job is to keep employees in a kind of trance. Part of that would involve responding swiftly to employee concerns so that the employees maintain the illusion that the company cares and that it was just a mistake. From the perspective of the employees, they must think their employers are extra nice.
They must think it reflects the broader reality of how they treat everyone else.
[+] [-] linsomniac|5 months ago|reply
It's pretty shameful that these large companies have no real way to contact them.
[+] [-] barbazoo|5 months ago|reply
Along the same lines, I think organizations shouldn't be allowed to send out email but not receive email at the same address, e.g. noreply@. That's just hostile in general.
[+] [-] annoyingcyclist|5 months ago|reply
(I didn't want to actually host my own mail stack, so I just have a custom domain set up with fastmail and point the MX to them. Their UI is great and a breath of fresh air compared to gmail. I guess they could in theory decide to lock me out randomly too, though I trust them to have actual customer support and can just point the MX somewhere else in the worst case)
[+] [-] randycupertino|5 months ago|reply
There was a thread on reddit from an escort who was on a podcast talking about how she was banned from instagram and facebook (for promoting her escorting!) and the only way she was able to get her account back was to seduce some high-level meta employees via linkedin, date them and then convince them to reinstate her accounts.
edit- not sure if this is the same girl but here is a similar article about this scenario: https://www.newsweek.com/onlyfans-star-slept-meta-employees-...
[+] [-] Sleaker|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] sizzle|5 months ago|reply
“ The response was: The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. Please try double-checking the recipient's email address for typos or unnecessary spaces. For more information, go to https://support.google(.)com/mail/?p=NoSuchUser”
Then it has a phishing email copied below trying to look legitimate.
Can I create a filter to block this spam for good? It’s been happening for over a year now and makes me think one of my emails failed to send so I jump to open it ugh.
[+] [-] hollow-moe|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Schmoigel|5 months ago|reply
It's sadly all too common these days for companies to have no general customer support, only forums full of powerless volunteers. It's even started to become that phone support lines don't have anyone on the other end anymore; Microsoft for instance basically just has an LLM on the other end that waits for you to talk, then tells you to fuck off to the powerless support forum.
[+] [-] jimbo808|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] brewdad|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dfxm12|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobgkau|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Benlights|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] noman-land|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|5 months ago|reply
This is by design in order to prevent any meaningful path to having to manage user complaints. Companies, broadly, used to have teams of customer support people and you could call and someone would answer to route your issue. That still exists in a lot of family run business (trash collection, home services like cleaning, custom parts etc…) but is frankly extremely rare for the majority of corporate interactions.
That’s not coming back because it’s clear that having a black hole for service saves money and doesn’t prevent repeat customers because there’s no real competition in any market, in a way that would bring customer support back.
It’s just gone.
[+] [-] casey2|5 months ago|reply
If they can't figure out the problem from there with you description then they are just incompetent and you shouldn't be doing business with incompetent companies no matter how large or popular they are.
You should bring everything you rely on in house as much as possible if not possible then on business that has an incentive to work with you. If you can't afford to then question if your product is really providing value. Why anybody with greater memory than a goldfish would build on top of a google service is beyond me (probably just people falling for ads or propaganda) it's no different then building on known vulnerable software.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 297 times (+ all the soft killed services without adequate support) , shame on me!
[+] [-] pricechild|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] _-_-__-_-_-|5 months ago|reply
At the time, some people recommended buying an Occulus device and calling their support because they were able to recover accounts and they had human support. We tried appealing to the company on social media, but we didn't have any luck.
I had to rebuild my social media profile and our organizations profiles and I lost 14 years of Messenger conversations, posts, and photos. These memories were just gone. It sucked. For the non-profit, it meant lost donations and lost connections for our alumni. Keep your own content off-platform.
[+] [-] chicagojoe|5 months ago|reply
The amount of emotional capital held in various platforms is terrifying when you consider how easy it is to be locked out.
I now regularly "takeout" all of our actively used platforms and store them on physical media.
[+] [-] ToucanLoucan|5 months ago|reply
shrug This and that other thread today about Slack just seems to be what happens when you're determined to remove as many humans from your processes as possible.
[+] [-] pjc50|5 months ago|reply
This is one of the weird things about social media; it can be extremely valuable to people, but there's no way to actually pay the company providing it for the privilege of having a fair manual review from customer service.
[+] [-] stult|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] diebeforei485|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] CM30|5 months ago|reply
Gotta own your own platform to make sure you have a backup when that happens, and have at least some control over your own audience.
[+] [-] dylan604|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pndy|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] a5c11|5 months ago|reply
Now it's an expert level knowledge, especially amongst younger generation. Private websites are nearly extinct, thanks to (and not only) Google and SEO cancer.
Corporations like Meta are scared of people taking control over their own data, so they put lots of effort into making the content creation process as brainless as possible.
[+] [-] pogue|5 months ago|reply
However, after hunting around on reddit for solutions, I was quickly made aware of underground groups of individuals (hackers? I'm not sure what you'd call them) who offer account recovery for up to 1 to 2 grand per instance. These aren't just the people who send you phishing messages claiming to get your account back, but offer full services such as promotion, getting unbanned, having other users banned and etc.
We've seen news reports in the past where individuals or groups get backend access into Meta and then offer these sorts of features. [1]
But who else has access to these sorts of tools & features? I wouldn't be surprised at all if Meta moderators or employees are making a very nice side hustle for themselves doing this, as they'd have not only the access, but presumably know how to hide their tracks.
Just a theory. Anyway, if anyone has any ideas on getting an Instagram account back or filing an appeal or whatever, any info would be appreciated.
[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-instagram-fac...
[+] [-] United857|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Glyptodon|5 months ago|reply
To anyone on the outside, it's not clear at all if (a) there really was some kind of issue that consumers would want to know about, or (b) their page shouldn't have been removed to begin with.
It's not only (I'm sure) annoying to the company, which, being small, has responded in a relatively circumspect way, but annoying as a consumer because it's not very easy to interpret the signal.
In the same ballpark, but reverse, my news feed always has one or two posts from maybe fake groups that have seemingly AI-written stories that carefully mention the Tedoo app, and FB is all too happy to let that slide no matter how many times I report it as spam...
[+] [-] electric_muse|5 months ago|reply
It is not hard to imagine getting a black mark in some invisible proprietary profile that determines if you can access Uber Eats, LinkedIn, etc. and have no recourse to fix it or get another chance.
[+] [-] mschuster91|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] CM30|5 months ago|reply
If you're a popular creator that doesn't have much of a social media following, friends at Google or lots of lawyer money, RIP any chance of getting your channel back before/after it gets banned due to the hackers.
[+] [-] bdcravens|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dev_l1x_be|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] fajmccain|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Terr_|5 months ago|reply
A real hard wake-up call on the importance of owning your own online identity and content.
[+] [-] qingcharles|5 months ago|reply
99% of the time you can still log into a banned Reddit account and visit the internal appeals page. You are usually just "shadowbanned".
[+] [-] intended|5 months ago|reply
Firstly - Hah! this is the easier situation! This is Americans talking about reaching out to Americans. It’s even more fun when you are in another country, and need to go through your network to get attention to an issue.
Secondly - Everyone I know, who is in a T&S team or does content moderation hates this situation, and is glad that this is being highlighted. it’s considered unfair and absurd. Getting recourse because people know someone who know someone to get it to the right team, is NOT how things should work. Let alone at global levels.
I can give maybe a smaller firm or platform a pass. But at FAANG scales? Cmon.
——
This is also a reason why I think that Reddit dug its own grave, back when it found the testicular fortitude to oust moderators during the API black outs.
If a firm has the willingness to remove mods and craft new philosophies of engagement when the bottom line at risk - does it magically lose that capability during the remainder of the financial year?
[+] [-] ruralfam|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kashunstva|5 months ago|reply
At scale, the value of individual users approaches zero.
[+] [-] Razengan|5 months ago|reply
This "exploit" has been there for years.
I only ever used throwaway accounts on Facebook, just to access some services that were only accessible via FB. At some point FB banned my account. I created a new one on the browser. Worked fine. When I signed into that account on my iPhone: instant ban. Delete FB app on iPhone, reinstall FB, try new account, same thing. Try a new iPhone, same iCloud account, new FB account: instant ban again.
They can not only track you across app reinstalls, device resets, but also across multiple devices. And Apple facilitates it.
[+] [-] unknown|5 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] alex1138|5 months ago|reply
Someone needs to tell Zuckerberg about this thing called "antitrust" and not being a dick and that you can't run your company(ies????) like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
[+] [-] OptionOfT|5 months ago|reply
And it's already a hassle to report, so actual amount of people encountering the issue is probably higher.
One example comes to mind... I can't ask my Google Mini anymore to ping my remote. Many reports. Nothing from Google.
[+] [-] brendank310|5 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jongjong|5 months ago|reply
They must think it reflects the broader reality of how they treat everyone else.