&gt; in my case it was repurchase an old domain in order to prove that I owned itWhat happens if the domain-name is repurchased by someone else or claimed by Sedo, etc?

A few comments before, I&#x27;ve seen someone recommending to sign up for an (advanced!) (Microsoft&#x27;s) LinkedIn account  to solve an issue like this one. Then I guess to solve a problem with LinkedIn you&#x27;ll have to sign up for a Twitter account, and so on and so forth..?

At least stop signing up for new things so you don&#x27;t make the problem worse.It is a risk. I had a problem with my Google account, and while I was able to find a human to email about it, they were completely unable to help. It was literally &quot;you have to do the thing, even though it makes no sense, because that&#x27;s what our algorithm requires&quot; (in my case it was repurchase an old domain in order to prove that I owned it, so they could cancel the account associated with that domain. Literally makes no sense, but it was the only way their process could work). That was my &quot;ruh-oh&quot; moment when I realised their products are basically unsupported and therefore shouldn&#x27;t be used in production.

When I was buying domain I immediately blacklisted Google Domains. I was scared about tripping something and getting Gmail account banned.(yes, loss from not handling a single .com domain is minuscule for Google - but I wonder how common is to run away from any Google service due to risk to entire account)

I usually keep a separate email for these critical things. That is why I have 4 GMail accounts.

Disabling google accounts is whats stopping me from using GCP fully. what if the credit card got declined on GCP and the google bots decide to ban me from the whole eco system.

Well, TBH, it&#x27;s really &quot;$10 from 100M sales + $0 from O(7 billion) sales.&quot;

These are literally some of the most profitable companies in the world. Are you honestly saying they would cease to be profitable if they hired a few hundred people to staff a customer service team?

&gt; Google&#x2F;Facebook&#x2F;Twitter obviously run the &quot;$10 from 100M sales&quot; model - meaning the only way they can provide profitable support or moderation is via inanimate algorithms, and deal with the PR fallout when they go wrong.That isn&#x27;t necessary though - other companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP also have tens of millions - to billions - of customers all with their own support requirements: the solution is simple: make the customer put up their own money as collateral for getting to speak to a human.Microsoft charges $500 for a single business-class support ticket with ~8 hour return time[1] - and you get the money back if the ticket was not a PEBCAK issue. If you&#x27;re a company that depends on Azure or Visual Studio or Windows Server then keeping $500 around just makes sense.I just don&#x27;t understand why Google and other companies that deal with long-tail customers don&#x27;t provide this as an option.[1] In practice, if you have an Enterprise support contract, the effective cost is much lower AND you get a much quicker response time - but there&#x27;s more paperwork involved.

No, this is a problem inherent to the business model Google&#x2F;Facebook run.Stating a truism - to make a billion dollars, you either have to get $10 from 100M sales, $10k from 100k sales or $10M from 100 sales. Although each option leads to the same revenue, there are major implications as for the amount of support and attention you can spend on each customer.Google&#x2F;Facebook&#x2F;Twitter obviously run the &quot;$10 from 100M sales&quot; model - meaning the only way they can provide profitable support or moderation is via inanimate algorithms, and deal with the PR fallout when they go wrong.

You don&#x27;t have to move everything, just bits (like how you diversify stocks or singe points of failure). Try move away from Chrome, or swap Drive for Dropbox.Moving an email is admitably much harder, but after five years I&#x27;ve managed to do all the major ones.

Spend ~$5 of Google Adwords, and chances are you&#x27;ll have someone calling you regularly trying to talk you into using it more - at least that&#x27;s my experience. In the past it&#x27;s been a pain to get them to stop bothering me.If I have an issue with Google, I might try starting an adwords campaign and ask to speak to supervisors when their sales calls comes through, and see if there&#x27;s an in along the way of &quot;we would spend more, but you see you&#x27;ve done X that needs to be resolved first&quot;.My other approach - not tried it on Google, but it worked very well on DHL and Uber so far - is to sign up for LinkedIn&#x27;s premium subscription and use that to Inmail a bunch of VPs&#x2F;SVPs and set out my grievance. My experience so far is that you need to find someone high enough up to be under the illusion - from lack of customer contact - that everything is well. They often seem to be shocked to hear that customers hit the wall, and get approached rarely enough that it&#x27;s a novelty for them to help out (as such, it&#x27;ll probably stop working if everyone starts doing this...)With DHL in particular I got an SVP to get his assistant to light a fire under the customer service operation by telling them said SVP wanted to be kept up to date on how it went, and Cc&#x27;ing said SVP and me on the e-mails. A package they &quot;could do nothing about&quot; because it was supposedly on a boat back to the US, magically appeared in my office one business day later after it was located in a depot 5 minutes from my office (I wish I could say that was the first time DHL has told me a package was somewhere completely different to where it actually was)

In the past I had written about my experiences with crawling[1], from accidentally getting banned by Slashdot as a teenager doing linguistic analysis to accidentally DoS&#x27;ing a major website to being threatened with lawsuits.The latter parts of the story were when I was part of Common Crawl, a public good dataset that has seen a great deal of use. During my tenure there I crawled over 2.5 petabytes and 35 billion webpages mostly by myself.I&#x27;d always felt guilty of a specific case as our crawler hit a big name web company (top N web company) with up to 3000 requests per second* and they sent a lovely note that began with how much they loved the dataset but ended with &quot;please stop thrashing our cache or we&#x27;ll need to ban your crawler&quot;. It was difficult to properly fix due to limited engineering resources and as they represented many tens &#x2F; hundreds of thousands of domains, with some of the domains essentially proxying requests back to them.Knowing Google hammered you at 120k requests per second down to _only_ 20k per second has assuaged some portion of that guilt.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;state.smerity.com&#x2F;smerity&#x2F;state&#x2F;01EAN3YGGXN93GFRM8XWQA9FTR" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;state.smerity.com&#x2F;smerity&#x2F;state&#x2F;01EAN3YGGXN93GFRM8XW...</a>* Up to 3000 requests per second as it&#x27;d spike once every half hour or hour when parallelizing across a new set of URL seeds but would then decrease, with the crawl not active for all the month

I think returning http status code 429 (=too many requests) or 5xx should work. Google claims to respect it. And it&#x27;s not like they have choice really: the server is refusing to provide the content. Additionally, serving such an error should be as cheap or cheaper than a cache hit.

Google only takes calls for ad sales and gsuite support as far as I know. Beyond that shaming them on social media is the only way to get their attention. I used to work for a top five web site and even we couldn’t get ahold of anyone - one day Google decided to start crawling us at a rate of 120k rps and it was killing the site by pulling ancient content that was 100% cache miss. No way for us to get in touch with Google officially, our billionaire CEO hadn’t traded numbers with their billionaire CEO so no help there, one of the developers had a college buddy that landed at Google and that guy was able to use some sort of internal mailing list to get them to drop the crawl rate down to 20k rps.(Microsoft is just as bad - their sales people can’t be bothered to talk to anyone who isn’t a partner, but that worked out great for me, I wasn’t really feeling azure and it made a great excuse to not consider them. One of their sales people did leave me a VM three or four months later but we had already chosen another vendor by then).

The system works! Just takes about a decade.

Nope. My Adsense account was banned almost 9 years ago. I followed their appeals process, gave all the information required, and received automated responses every time. I repeatedly appealed over the last 9 years, receiving the automated rejections every time, until finally a few weeks ago for some reason they approved the appeal and my account was reinstated :shrugs:

You would need legal standing. A free account isn&#x27;t your property.

I’m an Indian staying in US, but probably not for long. Given how many of us are there, I don’t think Google India would have the capacity or care to hear our pleas. The only way to force them to build something useful is through government interference but I hardly feel that Indian government would do so.

&gt; Is there really no way for a user to get in touch with a human agent?File for a C&amp;D and then, if that does not help, a court-issued injunction order (&quot;Abmahnung&quot; followed by &quot;Antrag auf Erlass einer einstweiligen Verfügung&quot;), if you&#x27;re German. This works somewhat reasonable for Twitter, Facebook and Google.

How do you manage to get totally locked out of your account though: if I have backup codes, a backup email address, the backup code for my 2FA app... surely I am protected from this, right? Assuming my account doesn&#x27;t get hacked and turned into a spambot.I am sitting here thinking of what would happen if my Gmail account got blocked. The disruption it would cause to me is enormous.

&gt; EDIT: Found it - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;miguelytob&#x2F;status&#x2F;1315749803041619981" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;miguelytob&#x2F;status&#x2F;1315749803041619981</a>From recent tweets, it seems he&#x27;s now leaving Google, and is busy retweeting stuff about people who have been fired and&#x2F;or are suing Google. Wonder if him leaving has anything to do with that incident and whether it was ever resolved.

A few months ago I&#x27;ve seen a Googler pissed on Twitter about how their spouses GMail account got suspended and he got completely stonewalled internally as well.It seems that even Googlers themselves cannot get any human contact for account support.(Sadly I can&#x27;t find that Twitter thread anymore.)EDIT: Found it - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;miguelytob&#x2F;status&#x2F;1315749803041619981" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;miguelytob&#x2F;status&#x2F;1315749803041619981</a>

After filling out a fairly lengthy questionnaire, google mentions they will have someone review the issue and get back with you.  I am on year 2 of waiting for a return call.

Is there really no way for a user to get in touch with a human agent? I read that Google automates the flagging and disabling of accounts but given how many people have their livelihood linked to these accounts, Google must have done something. It makes me scared how deep I have dived into the Google ecosystem. Time and time again I think about transitioning to someplace else but don’t know how to. It seems too daunting.

Google one gives you support it says. I had an issue with gpay once and the support chat was available and seemingly working.But when your account is suspended that doesn&#x27;t really help you eh

I pay $6&#x2F;month for a single user workspace to get that peace of mind. I don&#x27;t understand why someone would entrust their digital live to a free service.

The customer LTV required to justify providing live support for a wide-market B2C product is non-trivial.But if you actually care that much, why not just pay for Google Workspace? The cheapest tier is $6 a month and gets you access to more or less what you want. (n.b.: I&#x27;m not making any representations about the quality of the support that you&#x27;d receive, only that it&#x27;s available. I don&#x27;t work at Google.)

Is there a good reason to keep using gmail? I&#x27;ve only got good things to say about Fastmail - which is paid, reliable, faster than gmail and private. And they&#x27;re reinvesting some of their revenue into making better standards for email.I haven&#x27;t needed to contact support, but I think they have a manned tech support email address too.

If that’s what you want, I recommend fastmail.For storage, I’ve successfully reached human tech support at synology and backblaze.

Don&#x27;t you get that with Google One? Never tried the support, but it says there&#x27;s chat  (2-3mn response time) and email support (24hrs or less)

I&#x27;d easily pay for a personal gmail account which has all the privacy protections on and also 24&#x2F;7 access to customer support via chat and phone. Sadly most of that is only provided for business accounts.

I’d love my inexplicably banned ebay account back, or at least have an explanation rather than “there is no appealing this ban”.

A totally fair point but in this case I wouldn&#x27;t consider &quot;famous person&quot; being the shocking part of this. The shocking part, as others in the thread have pointed out, is that this is a business partner of Google&#x27;s.

We only hear the celebs that got their accounts suspended.
Imagine how many others are stuck and have nowhere to talk to.

Makes you wonder whether that is their unbanning process.

Good on him. Takes courage and an established product to do this.Good example of standing up.

I think it&#x27;s also probably easy to do this with stadia since it&#x27;s effectively 0 users. What would he say if steam treated devs like google does?

Agreed about small devs, but other small devs also have to make countless  decisions about which platforms&#x2F;products to use for their app&#x2F;platform&#x2F;website. At the very least, Google should be worried that a good tie-breaker is &quot;Is it a Google platform?&quot;.

Hopefully, more devs will do what this dev is (said to be) doing.&gt; Consider it burned. #Terraria for @GoogleStadia is canceled. My company will no longer support any of your platforms moving forward.Of course, it&#x27;s very difficult for small devs to do this. It takes an already solid business to be able to stand up like this. As always, I think this is the only way for Google to change, but I don&#x27;t think it can happen.

Twitter seems to be the worst platform ever created to get customer support.If any entity requires a huge amount of Twitter followers to get support, count me out.

This is probably because in the beginning they want publicity.

Or the @GoogleStadia Twitter account will forward this to someone who knows about it. The Stadia Twitter account is uncharacteristically active on customer support for a Google product.

&gt; due to Googles systems being so complex a single-service ban is very hard to implementNow that sounds like a technical problem that could be solved!

&gt; * GDPR&#x2F;Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of providing service to him), so the deletion process can&#x27;t be delayed.This is simply wrong since the account is always &quot;banned&quot; and not &quot;deleted&quot;. So the data is still there, not providing it is going against GDPR. Evidence for this is all the accounts that were unbanned and still had their data. Make the account read-only for all I care but don&#x27;t think for a second that this data has to be deleted immediately (It definitely does not, there are reasons and reasonable ways for data to be retained for some time)&gt; * Untrustable employees. Google tries not to trust any employee with blanket access to your account. That means they couldn&#x27;t even hire a bunch of workers to review these accounts - without being able to see the account private data, the employee wouldn&#x27;t be able to tell good from bad accounts.But somehow accounts get unbanned if they get enough attention... so this does not seem to be a problem.&gt; * Attacks on accounts. There are ways for someone who doesn&#x27;t like you to get a Google account banned. Usually there are no logs kept (due to privacy reasons) that help identify what happened. Example method: Email someone a PDF file containing an illegal image, then trick them into clicking &quot;save to drive&quot;. The PDF can have the image outside the border of the page so it looks totally normal.So simultaneusly you can look at the image to ban the account but can&#x27;t look at it to unban it? I get that the first one is done by algorithms and the second one presumably is not but calling this a privacy issue is laughable since you don&#x27;t have to look at the content in the first place.All of your points don&#x27;t adress the issue of &quot;The user does not even know why he was banned&quot; at all. Luckily there are EU laws in the pipeline for that.

Even if all of that is completely true, failing to engage in any form of communication with a business partner whose services you cut off without any notice is reprehensible.

Many other companies of similar size manage to provide customer service just fine.This is a solved problem - you just have to be willing to realise that magic AI sprinkles aren’t the answer.As for cost - this continual stream of screwups is costing them a ridiculous amount of goodwill and future business. It’s probably the best ad for AWS there is.

&gt; * GDPR&#x2F;Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of providing service to him), so the deletion process can&#x27;t be delayed.That&#x27;s absolutely not how GDPR works.

Doesn&#x27;t seem an issue at all for almost every other company in the world.Only seems to be an issue for companies like Google who ideologically don&#x27;t provide any way to talk to a human and escalate. Amazon manages to have some of the best customer service in the world while operating on similar scales with far more things that can go wrong.There is no excuse.

&gt; * Legal stuff (eg. some algorithm detected child porn in his account, is an employee legally allowed to look at it to confirm the algorithm was correct? no.)If you had experience with this, you would know that you just described the polar opposite of how that process works in the United States. Federal law requires human verification as part of the mandatory NCMEC reporting process. If you’re employed by Google and have that impression of how it works it means the green badges doing the work aren’t known to you, which isn’t a huge shock since TVCs are barely one step above disposable barcode at Google.Source: I’ve forensically verified enough child exploitation in the course of tech employment to make me thoroughly and irredeemably despise humanity as a species. (Fighting insurance to pay for therapy I now need, against their will, was fun too.)

I&#x27;m no expert on Google and I don&#x27;t have a PhD but from my time working there (and my time working at other internet services companies), multiple of your assertions here are false or absurd.Child porn detection and enforcement literally does not work that way. I&#x27;m not sure how you even think that would work. How do you think the algorithm gets trained? Humans feed data into it. All the major social media companies (Facebook, etc) have paid human moderators that have to screen flagged content in many cases to determine whether it is illegal and then escalate to the relevant staff or authorities, and in some cases this is a legal requirement.The GDPR one is especially ridiculous. Why would you be required to delete a user&#x27;s data the moment you suspend their account? That&#x27;s utterly absurd, it completely eliminates the user&#x27;s recourse in the event of an error. No reasonable human being would interpret the laws that way and the relevant regulators (yes, GDPR is enforced by humans) would never require you to do that.Google already has measures to deal with malware on machines, typically temporary or permanent bans of the hardware and&#x2F;or IP address. They don&#x27;t have to permanently delete your gmail account to lock out Chrome on a single malwared PC. If you&#x27;ve ever done any automation or browsed on a shared network you&#x27;ve probably seen Google Search throw up the &#x27;automated traffic&#x27; warning and block you for a bit.Being able to review conduct of an account (i.e. browse logs) is not &quot;blanket access to your account&quot; and neither is being able to examine the details on why the account was banned and reverse them. The account owner could also authorize the employee to access their data - any time you talk to a Customer Service representative for a company, you&#x27;re doing this.

3 completely different points:1. Ignore the downvotes. The reality (poor customer service perception) is what it is. Objectively looking at the problem and what can be done about it, without cynically assuming it&#x27;s impossible, is the most practical focus going forward. Thanks very much for this insight, it was really interesting to read.2. I&#x27;ve noticed various glitches and bugs over the years with various services - two I can remember right now are a) misspelling a search then clicking &quot;did you mean&quot; won&#x27;t update the titlebar (been watching this one since ~2012), and b) accidentally sending an in-progress draft from one device will cause followup edits made on another device to sent to &#x2F;dev&#x2F;null. Well... I look at the kind of time-wasting junk input that makes it into Issue Tracker, I look at random app feedback, etc, and I know my feedback is never going to be seen. I can understand why things need to impact 10K people to be noticed. I thought I&#x27;d ask you: what&#x27;s a good recommendation here?3. Extremely specific question that I happen to be worrying about at the moment :) - I wasn&#x27;t sure which Google account I wanted to use to play with GCP some months ago so I ended up enabling billing on more than one account using the same card. I have an idea I&#x27;d like to play which would call for a new account (since it would be tied to a YouTube channel) and would require me to use the same card yet again. All of this would be staying within the free tier, but I still wonder if I shouldn&#x27;t run data takeouts first...? (I can&#x27;t deny that the current state of Google services feels a bit like Russian roulette with extra servings of superstition - what doesn&#x27;t kill your account, makes it stronger, or something??)

&gt; * GDPR&#x2F;Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of providing service to him), so the deletion process can&#x27;t be delayed.I do not think GDPR works like that. You can absolutely store information pertaining to &quot;why&quot; questions because that is still a service they will be providing. Also, whenever they restore some&#x27;s service they give data back. So they have obviously not deleted the data.

People at Google really do want to fix this... But it&#x27;s a minefield of:* Legal stuff (eg. some algorithm detected child porn in his account, is an employee legally allowed to look at it to confirm the algorithm was correct? no.)* Internal Politics (eg. one team has found this account DoSing their service, while the account is perfectly normal in all other ways, but due to Googles systems being so complex a single-service ban is very hard to implement)* GDPR&#x2F;Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of providing service to him), so the deletion process can&#x27;t be delayed.* Stolen&#x2F;shared accounts. All it takes is one evil browser extension to steal your user account cookie and go on a spamming spree. Figuring out how it happened is near impossible (user specific logs are anonymized). Usually just resetting the users logins doesn&#x27;t solve it because the malware is still on the users computer&#x2F;phone and will steal the cookie again.* Falsely linked accounts. Some spammers create gmail addresses to send spam, but to disguise them they link lots of real peoples accounts for example via using someone elses recovery phone number, email address, contacts&#x2F;friends, etc. In many cases they will compromise real accounts to create all these links, all so that as many real users as possible will be hurt if their spamming network is shutdown.* Untrustable employees. Google tries not to trust any employee with blanket access to your account. That means they couldn&#x27;t even hire a bunch of workers to review these accounts - without being able to see the account private data, the employee wouldn&#x27;t be able to tell good from bad accounts.* Attacks on accounts. There are ways for someone who doesn&#x27;t like you to get a Google account banned. Usually there are no logs kept (due to privacy reasons) that help identify what happened. Example method: Email someone a PDF file containing an illegal image, then trick them into clicking &quot;save to drive&quot;. The PDF can have the image outside the border of the page so it looks totally normal.Yes, it&#x27;s solvable, and Google should put more effort into it, but it&#x27;s hard to do.

As usual, some Googler browsing HN will reactivate his account, everyone will forget and Google won&#x27;t change a thing to his unbanning process.

It was like a couple of weeks ago when an Android app got banned from the Play Store because they supported Advanced SubStation Alpha (ASS) subtitles and mentioned it in the description.

These are exactly the cases that worry me. ML &#x2F; AI is not ready to be used like that. IDK if it ever will be, but they are already using it in production anyways.

Yes and it&#x27;s proof there is no such thing as &quot;AI&quot;, just stupid pattern matching programmed by not very brillant people.

My suspicion is that this is mostly happening because platforms that big like google or twitter rely very heavily on machine learning and other AI related technology to ban peopleMost likely yes. And the annoying thing is that they don&#x27;t take into account different languages. The AI can recognize words, but not meaning.A while ago some Dutch person tweeted: &quot;Die Bernie Sanders toch.&quot; Die = that, in Dutch. But the AI obviously recognized the word (to) &#x27;die&#x27; in English along with Bernie Sanders and just instantly drops the ban hammer. And it takes days,if not weeks to get an actual human to look at your case.

He is developer of Terraria including their official Youtube has been suspended. What does a guy have to do to become a true Scotsman? Fall acy?

I think the point is that he has direct business with Google and yet _even he_ can&#x27;t get his account unbanned.If someone in that position is screwed, an average joe is most definitely screwed.

It&#x27;s possible to have a system that marks high profile accounts that shouldn&#x27;t have automated actions applied ... that it appears Google doesn&#x27;t have something like this is worrying.

There&#x27;s virtually no chance that the automated system that banned him knew the account belonged to someone with whom Stadia was doing business. Even if we assume there&#x27;s a list of high profile people&#x2F;accounts not to automatically disable, I can&#x27;t see him being on it.

Network effects are pretty handy, though.

Then move off. It&#x27;s not the only solution.There are alternatives to all these:
Search,
Email,
Game streaming,
Online doc editing,
Etc

Popularity cannot be dictated, unless you&#x27;re suggesting something like a regulation that would limit the total number of users a website is allowed to register.

Maybe the solution is to not have single platforms that are this big.

Their size insulates them from competition, which means less accountability.We need to give them competition in the form of neutral and permissionless decentralized platforms. Such platforms should be the primary forum for commerce and communication, and privately owned permissioned platforms like Google should be small&#x2F;bit players in comparison.Right now the situation, in terms of whether the digital commons are primarily controlled by private companies or by public networks, is the opposite of what it should be.

This can be gamed. There are so many stolen credit card numbers and&#x2F;or payments using Apple&#x2F;Google pre-paid cards out there, so it&#x27;s not difficult to automatically build accounts with this kind of &#x27;reputation&#x27;.Unfortunately the best way to do KYC is (still) human intervention (and use of data).

Forget ML, this is just business process mapping. If it&#x27;s a payer-customer&#x27;s account, issues should be sent to a human. Payer-customers should have access to a secondary channel (read: alternate phone number). Payer-customers Google contact(s) should be notified &amp; included in the process.As a general rule of thumb, if Google is struggling with a problem, it&#x27;s not a tech problem.

Shows the bias in machine learning. One simple parameter isn&#x27;t added and the whole model is bullshit.One parameter would be: Amount of money this customer has spend on our products.Another would be: Active time since signup.I&#x27;m pretty sure if &quot;money spend &gt; 0&quot; is actually a legitimate threshold to remove a lot of spam, although not all. &quot;money spend &gt; 200&quot; might to the trick though.

I think there is a simple solution: the &quot;fail2ban&quot; approach.
Instead of banning, lock out users for some times (1 day).
An AI system should make temporary changes to your IAM, and then report too often disabled guys to a human being

It won&#x27;t change until they start bleeding enough users that it actually starts hurting them. In other words, when they mess up with someone &quot;important enough&quot; prepared to hold a serious grudge.[EDIT: I still hold a grudge against DHL for 20 years ago listing my credit cards as &quot;in transit to South Korea&quot; while I was in Santa Cruz, waiting for them. If Google hits someone with an actual large following or sufficient clout in a large company, then they might just find that one day they do so to someone prepared to hold a 20 year grudge even if they eventually fix the immediate issue -- I&#x27;m not mad at DHL for the initial mistake, but for the amount of trouble and lies I had to deal with before they took it seriously]

please consider indieweb.org&#x2F;POSSE to not loose your digital home, when huge organisations cancel tiny ones.The big ones just cannot care about all, even if they really wanted. They had to be both onmiscient and omnipotent.

Couldn&#x27;t care less about twitter but if you use google for email&#x2F;storage&#x2F;docs etc then it&#x27;s a real issue.Email is how i do business or access to other websites and i store important documents in the cloud.Like you i&#x27;ve seen the ban issue many times and even worse there&#x27;s no customer support to help (just automated responses). Ever since i&#x27;ve been migrating away from google.

&gt; Sheer hubris?I would actually lean towards organizational incompetence. There is just too much human brain mass at Google to say the the company as a whole is screwing up this bad because of hubris. They are just at such a high complexity level that the disorganization is causing incompetent outcomes.

&gt;Why would they continue like that.Sheer hubris?

And that is why &quot;innocent until proved guilty&quot; is such an important tenet of Western justice.

Well, frankly speaking, as an individual or a small company, you do not matter much, especially in comparison to the cost to get the problem fixed. While an organization grows larger, it has to employ lots of processes which are obviously not perfect to make things work. When it grows even larger, it has to make changes to existing processes, abolish some processes become no longer appropriate and introduce new processes over existing processes to serve their business better. Unavoidably more and more automation are introduced and eventually AI. All those changes seem to be really minor and clear and works in most of cases. Yep, I meant most cases, not all cases. Then suddenly, something really should work per everything standard and process stopped working and no one really knows why. So here comes the question, if you are the decision maker, your system works for 99.999999% maybe even 99.999999999% of your customers but not for those 1 maybe 10 customers, are you going to spend $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ to get it fixed?

Agree. I find it odd that so many people bring up this argument, like these companies aren&#x27;t sitting on piles of cash that could be invested in systemic, human-in-the-loop improvements. (Ok, maybe except Twitter)

You think humans are better at spotting abuse?   Mods on Reddit demonstrate that such systems can be worse.

&gt; Because honestly, the amount of spam and abuse that are likely happening on these platforms has to be mind boggling high.So hire more people. You can&#x27;t argue that you can&#x27;t do your work properly because your AI is not yet up to the task.

These companies are maximizing their margins at our expense.&gt; &quot;the amount of spam and abuse that are likely happening on these platforms has to be mind boggling high&quot;That is true, but the amount of money these platforms are making is mind bogglingly high, too. It&#x27;s just that they decided that they will use low-cost automated methods in order to maximize margins. And as long as we all accept this, it&#x27;s a good decision: more money!But it is absolutely possible to do these things right, it just costs more.

&gt; Why would they continue like that. Isn&#x27;t there one single PR person at Google?Does bad PR actually cost Google money? I&#x27;m not sure it does.A bunch of advertisers claimed they were going to boycott Facebook, but they didn&#x27;t stick with it, and it didn&#x27;t meaningfully impact FB revenue.I think the only think that will really dent Google at this point is privacy legislation, so the only PR they&#x27;re worried about it is upsetting legislators -- not upsetting game devs.

&gt; Why would they continue like that. Isn&#x27;t there one single PR person at Google?Because they can afford it, they are a monopoly

I wrote an essay about big tech&#x27;s aim for a monopoly on moderation.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.remarkbox.com&#x2F;remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.remarkbox.com&#x2F;remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....</a>

Regardless of what&#x27;s happening internally, I&#x27;ve come to the realization that Google has become the prototypical dystopian corporation. Yes, perhaps not the only one, and perhaps I should have come to this realization just sooner, but there it is.Taking the long view, the apparent culture of &quot;just don&#x27;t give a sh*&quot; isn&#x27;t going to work for the human race, not in the long run.

Google is above needing PR.  Or at least they seem to think so.

Yeah. Its super scary. The idea that an algorithm decides and no legal recourse, all decided by a company that has an illegal amount of control on what is supposed to be public space.Imagine all the public squares to be owned by some company rather than the community. Now imagine an algorithm deciding to exclude you from that. To just ban you from participating in life.It is taking too long for Google to understand what they need to do (to own public space, you must bring all the other public stuff too, like a legal system and proper rights protection and due dilligence).We should kill the monster, while we still can. Break them up. They&#x27;ll never learn. They&#x27;ll keep destroying lifes. Less than 0.1% is acceptable statistical error, right? Just pray you are never the 0.1%.

Businesses that have this happen to them should call a lawyer and sue. That ought to get a human on the line...

I just gave up the last time my google account died. There&#x27;s really little value in it at this point if you&#x27;re not publishing apps and I would never build a business on one of their platforms for this reason anyway.

&gt; And lets be honest google could totally affort a human review processThis is the part I find baffling. Why can’t they take 10 Google engineer’s worth of salaries, and hire a small army of overseas customer reps to handle cases like this? I realize that no customer support has been in Google’s DNA since the beginning, but this is such a weird hill to die on.

&gt; So I get why they would try to automate bans.The problems are less the automated bans but the missing human support after you got automated banned.I you got banned go through a reasonable fast human review process then temporary reinstated a day later and fully reinstated a view days later it would be super annoying comparable with all google services being down for a day, but no where close to the degree of damage it causes now.And lets be honest google could totally affort a human review process, even if they limit it to accounts which have a certain age and had been used from time to time (to make it much harder to abuse it).But they are as much interested in this as they are in giving out reasons why you are banned, because if they would do you might be able to sue them for arbitrary discrimination against people who fall into some arbitrary category. Or similar.What law makers should do is to require proper reasons to be given on service termination of any kind, without allowing an opt. out of this of any kind.

There&#x27;s another post making the rounds on HN at the moment: &quot;Chatbots were the next big thing: what happened?&quot;this. this is why. bots, chat or otherwise, are not competent enough to replace humans.Actually, sometime humans aren&#x27;t that great at this either, if poorly paid&#x2F;motivated&#x2F;trusted.

This happens again and again. I have had that happen to my twitter account. I see this regulary on HN.My suspicion is that this is mostly happening because platforms that big like google or twitter rely very heavily on machine learning and other AI related technology to ban people. Because honestly, the amount of spam and abuse that are likely happening on these platforms has to be mind boggling high.So I get why they would try to automate bans.But after years and years of regular high profile news of false positives, one would think they eventually would change something.I mean the guy had direct business with Google going on....Why would they continue like that. Isn&#x27;t there one single PR person at Google?

On revenue reports, the term Google Cloud includes Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Google Workspace (formerly G Suite). Sorry for the confusion.

You probably want support, not a salesperson: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;support&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;support&#x2F;</a>Basic billing support (including account suspensions etc) is available to all GCP users for free via ticket, chat or phone.

Google Cloud at least has a contact page with a contact form.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;contact" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud.google.com&#x2F;contact</a>It may not be the right human, but it will be a human you get in touch with.

Note that many people have Google accounts.30 000 random bans per year without justification are entirely consistent with Google Cloud revenue in billions.In similar way as people keep doing things despite (sometimes tiny!) potential for death, mutilation or bankruptcy.

We keep hearing horror stories like this on HN and yet Google Cloud revenue jumps to $13.06 billion in 2020, up 47% year-over-year from $8.92 billion in 2019.Either HN bias towards google is making sure these posts hit front page frequently (frequent enough for me to notice at least) or certain tiers of customers are treated differently.

i suspect that google&#x27;s cloud infrastructure&#x27;s first customer is google themselves, and they don&#x27;t care that nobody else is buying it.

I use Google Cloud and the support has been pretty good. We have an account manager, engineering support contacts, all sorts. We also have SLAs so they can&#x27;t just cut off our account.There&#x27;s a difference between someone with a Gmail account who added a card to GCP and spun up a VM, and a business with a business account. Google support isn&#x27;t there for the former, but there&#x27;s plenty of it for the latter.

I&#x27;m the first one to jump onto the Google-hating train, but Google is literally throwing engineers at us for free so ours are ready to migrate large workloads off from our platform onto GCP.It also helps that we&#x27;re one of the largest telcos.Google has humans, but only for contracts big enough.

Human support for Google Cloud has been very good, even on a small account.Now if only they could figure it out for consumer accounts... Those are customers as well and deserve to be treated as such.

GCP is the only Google service where I regularly, easily, got humans to take up my problem.Once including waking up people in Mountain View on weekend.

Can you imagine any serious new project starting on Google Cloud with their lack of human support? I wonder if Google knows this is why they will never compete with Azure or AWS.

How much money should I waste into Google Cloud to have good support for my Google account ?

It has pretty good support _today_. Who knows what will change with Google tomorrow given its track record? Amazon otoh has been exactly consistent in its customer support starting from amazon.com till AWS.

Not for everyone: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17431609" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=17431609</a>From the comments:&gt; Because of a keyword monitor picked up by their auto-moderation bot our entire project was shut down immediately

What if my Google Cloud account gets nuked because of something not related to it? Can I still contact the Cloud support to get my account back open again?

Google Cloud actually has pretty good and reachable support including by phone in case you have login issues.

Same here. We&#x27;re only in the high six figures in annual spend, but we wanted to do some low-level multi-cloud replication of our data and database read replicas, maybe looking toward compute multi-cloud in the future. Google Cloud entered and exited the discussion within a day.We do disaster recovery and analysis all the time. And, not just dumb-brain &quot;well, this is what their policies say happens&quot;, but real-world &quot;this is what we&#x27;re reading around social media, use-cases, blog posts, etc&quot;. This Terraria situation has already made the rounds in our slack DR channels.We pulled off G-Suite about a year ago due to their stance on privacy, and concerns that the corporate firewall of G-Suite may not be as strong as they want you to believe, intentionally or not. Account lockout issues are also, obviously, a secondary concern.Google Enterprise&#x2F;Workspace&#x2F;Cloud&#x2F;etc needs to be separated from Google. At this point, I am blown away that their investors haven&#x27;t begun to demand it. I understand that they may look at it as a new revenue growth area for the whole company, but frankly, this is flat-out wrong. These conversations are happening in nearly every technology-oriented enterprise. Google cannot be trusted, not by consumers, not be enterprises. Google proper is a cultural liability to the actually strong products their enterprise divisions put out.

The company I work for has banned the use of Google Cloud due to how they treat their Play Store developers, in particular that there never seems to be any human being that you can talk to and find out what you need to do to fix the situation. We do not want the same to occur to our servers or if there is an overflow from Play Store ban to GCP etc.

When my outlook.com account was banned by Microsoft, i wrote a letter to ms in Germany.got a reply 4 weeks later without any solution. account was never unblocked.since then i am not trusting Microsoft and not purchasing any of their products.

What would happen if you mailed Google a physical letter about this&#x2F;faxed them something? YouTube has a mailing address and a fax number.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;contact_us" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;t&#x2F;contact_us</a>That seems to be what they want...

&gt; were a problem since foundation of GoogleYou might be right, but Google changed as a company.They started selling phones (ok, even if your account gets locked... you can still use your phone and&#x2F;or create a new account to install free apps from what was the android market)They started to sell storage (ok, even if your account gets locked, as long as you can retrieve your contents with Takeout, you just lost access to Google Drive, and not something of lasting value)And they&#x27;ve been selling music (not anymore), movies, books, games (both on Play store and Stadia)... and more hardware that ties into their services (e.g. Nest Hub is useful precisely because you can have it automatically show your pictures from Google Photos, and you can have calls with other people on Duo)The more new commercial products they offer, the more they should be careful about account bans. At the very least you want to segment access to them (as an extreme* example: even if you uploaded child pornography on Google Drive, after you&#x27;ll have paid your debt to society, you ought still be able to play Cyberpunk 2077 that you purchased on Stadia)(* extreme both because of the heinousness of the crime, and also how trivial&#x2F;unimportant a videogame is on the grand scheme of things... but I think there&#x27;s an easier case to be made for someone to retain access to the game that they purchased, vs retaining access to their Google contacts, which might not even be backed by any payment for the service)

What Eric Schmidt would do to help with Google Account bans? Bans without any appeal process were a problem since foundation of Google and it&#x27;s exactly how Schmidt built that company.The only people who ever got their accounts recovered at all were celebrities or people who go HN &#x2F; reddit frontpage.

Most companies doesn&#x27;t have leadership, they have administrators and bureaucrats who are paid a high salary to ensure the company doesn&#x27;t change course.Sometimes a great leader appears, but most of the time big companies are just slowly rotting away after the initial people created and grew it.

Same thing happened with Schmidt too. I have heard stories of people banned from (some) Google&#x27;s services and unable to get any help a decade ago. Nothing new here, unfortunately((

It is not a meme. You tell me what did Google achieve under Sundar in the last 6 years? The only &quot;noteworthy&quot; things he did is fostering a hostile environment by firing employees who spoke out against discrimination, and fighting against unionization.

What is this meme about Sundar being bad? Any details on this .... I keep seeing this on HN.&quot;Google Support&quot; was already a joke way back.

Just look at the revenue chart. After all that&#x27;s what a company&#x27;s ultimate goal is.

I just don’t understand Google leadership, how can you allow stuff like this to happen and just ignore it? Your brand keeps getting more and more tainted, people make jokes out of your strategy and tendency to give up like a little child...I didn’t think I would ever say it, but I miss Eric Schmidt... Sundar has been an absolute disaster. Has Google even accomplished anything during his reign? And if they did, did they accomplish because of him OR despite him being there?

For whatever it is worth, you can setup Takeout to make a copy every X months for a year or something like that. Far cry from automated solution, but better than nothing.I need to find Photos alternative because that&#x27;s the last Google service that gets any real use.

Within Google Takeout, you can setup monthly backup to another service (I chose OneDrive with 1TB storage)

What method do you use? I want something automated, I don&#x27;t have time to trigger google take out every so often and then manual click 100s of links and download them.

This is the reason why I have offsite backups of my Google account as everyone has a chance of getting banned. It really feels like Russian roulette.

Every time these stories come out I get terrified. And, angry, because just like all the carelessly built services that get breached because of poor-to-nonexistent security, this taints all SaaS companies a bit.

The recent Parler incident is proof otherwise. If you happen to cause any inconvenience for them, you are at risk of being cut off.

Utterly untrue. AWS is not a &#x27;systematic risk&#x27;, that&#x27;s absolutely ridiculous and I can&#x27;t even begin to address that statement.

I think I&#x27;ve seen meaningful support for this level of AdWords spend.A $5k a month cloud bill definitely gets this.

This is inaccurate. A $50K a month AdWords spend does not get meaningful support.

Can&#x27;t speak for Google, but I&#x27;ve gotten great phone support from AWS while spending less than $100 a month.

Having core parts of your personal computing or business computing rely on Google or AWS infrastructure is a systematic risk. Unless you are are racking up a $50k bill every month, you are simply too small that anyone there would care.

Three days from initial warning to disabling their account is ridiculous though. What if the person behind that mailbox was off sick or on holiday?

Given it&#x27;s the Terraria YouTube account it has to be either stupidity or accidental, both on Google&#x27;s part.My imagination fails trying to picture a scenario where you could justify suspending that account.

&gt; They assumed it was issued accidentallyThat seems like a dangerous assumption to make.

Some context:&gt; However, they were hit with a Terms of Service violation via email. They assumed it was issued accidentally, but three days later, their entire Google account was disabled without any warning or recourse.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techraptor.net&#x2F;gaming&#x2F;news&#x2F;terraria-studio-re-logic-suspended-from-youtube" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techraptor.net&#x2F;gaming&#x2F;news&#x2F;terraria-studio-re-logic-...</a>

This is why I avoid using important services (i.e. e-mail accounts, your backups, any digital products) in the one place. Just a little violate and then lose access to all of them. It can happen anytime, shouldn&#x27;t be left to chance.

and pretty soon google is charging &#x27;protection money&#x27; to all the victims of a hack.

It&#x27;s SUPPOSED TO BE pay-to-play.  Google is a business.  That&#x27;s how businesses work.  That&#x27;s the entire point.

It is unfair from a consumer standpoint, but at least it would avoid Google&#x27;s self-dug grave from getting deeper.From a B2B standpoint, it&#x27;s just the name of the game. If a partner business is a strategic asset, you fast-track them. Imagine an advertising firm treating a multi-national corporation at the same (crappy) level as a small, family-owned company. Or, imagine Microsoft treating the US government and an ordinary Windows user alike. That&#x27;s bonkers, and yet it&#x27;s an apt description of how Google does business right now.

&gt; If they did this, how would you prevent people from saying that is unfair, or making it seem like it is pay to play, or something like that?You can&#x27;t please everyone; here is how I would frame it.Stadia developers and business partners receive Enterprise Support.It&#x27;s absurd that they aren&#x27;t already doing something like this.

&gt; anyone doing business with youIf they did this, how would you prevent people from saying that is unfair, or making it seem like it is pay to play, or something like that?Disclaimer: Work at Google (far from this space); opinions are my own.

&gt;Why pay a human to do something? Let the computer do the thingThis is why I think Google&#x2F;Twitter&#x2F;FB were not that vocal about the section 230 business. Honestly if they got brought through it would be expensive for them but they have the money and tech potential to automate any problems that arise from it which would just extends their moat from any potential competitors even more.

This is the exact opposite of what Google&#x2F;Apple want to do. Why pay a human to do something? Let the computer do the thing, and a Google-human will listen only of the victim-human will yell loud enough. This is their tiering system.On the other side though, Google cannot have 1 FTE per 1000 &#x27;clients&#x27; (paying-humans and&#x2F;or product-humans). As a &#x27;father&#x27; here wrote, you stay or you go. Or at least keep the personal stuff out (&#x27;15years of gmail&#x27; - WHY???) and leave the app-stuff within Google (or Apple for that matter).

I can see the Black Mirror episode already...&quot;In the case of Johnson v Esposito where the defendant is claimed to have sent an email to the plaintiff wherein this created a detrimental page rank effect due to defendant&#x27;s low score...&quot;

Noting the reputation of your clients is powerful and ethical - the Chinese government is a monopolistic violent organisation, which makes its power evil

&gt; The correct approach is to make sure it doesn&#x27;t happen incorrectly in the first place, and that it can be resolved quickly and easily if it ever does....and if you can&#x27;t make it work at a given scale, don&#x27;t do your business at this scale until you can. But that would be leaving money on the table now, wouldn&#x27;t it? So, with no outside pressure, the companies at the top are the ones who don&#x27;t care about making things work right.

Two wrongs sometimes make a right. So 10 wrongs make 5 rights?There is no more than 100% wrong. Saying it is 1000% wrong implies that you are arguing emotionally, not rationally.Rationally, it doesn&#x27;t matter how google reacts to their non-customers. There is no obligation to treat them well. The correct approach for non-customers is to either become a customer or to switch to another provider.If somebody is wrong it is the non-customers who could fix the situation. Their unwillingness to change email providers is what enables google to keep on providing that bad service.

I think &quot;not treating business partners like trash&quot; is the absolute base minimum. If they can&#x27;t get that right, what hope do customers have? Feels like that needs to be solved first — particularly if it&#x27;s an issue of scale — then the customer issue dealt with afterwards, if it remains an issue.

The implication here is that the fix for this problem is to make sure it doesn&#x27;t happen to anyone who does business with Google, as if other people aren&#x27;t important enough to concern yourself about. That is 1000% the wrong approach, and exactly the sort of thinking that gets tech businesses in to this sort of mess.The correct approach is to make sure it doesn&#x27;t happen incorrectly in the first place, and that it can be resolved quickly and easily if it ever does.

100% agree. They just keep shooting themselves in the foot. Unbelievable.

Unfortunately for Google&#x27;s products- sorry, users, the machines doing the bans don&#x27;t give a damn for reputation in the eyes of humans.

Google already kind of practices this feature, it&#x27;s just that the &quot;reputation&quot; part is external:Is the public reputation of the owner of this account high enough that the ban will make the news?

Hey Google here is a feature: account reputation, anyone doing business with you, has that flag enabled and human reviewers will be supporting them

I use Fastmail with a personal domain name.

Do not host your own email unless you really, really want to do that for learning purposes or something similar.You can use fastmail, or if you don&#x27;t want to lose Gmail&#x27;s UI you can use GSuite which lets you use a personal domain name.

I switched from gsuite to protonmail, but I kinda wish I had checked out fastmail

I have done exactly this with Fastmail and my own domain, and the experience was wonderful, as in &quot;why didn&#x27;t I do this years ago&quot;.

Yes, I looked around now for a provider supporting custom domains so I don&#x27;t need to change address just because I change provider and came up with a few popular ones: Fastmail, Protonmail, Runbox. Note that Protonmail is &quot;special&quot; about their IMAP&#x2F;POP3 support, only supporting select clients and then via a particular helper application.It&#x27;s not only this issue with Google being like a wall when things happen, but also that I dislike their semi-AI based interface. While I like their good spam filter, there&#x27;s a lot of other stuff going on there, and that without any inbox rules that I have set up.

I am very happy with this 
 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gioorgi.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;mail-server-checks&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gioorgi.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;mail-server-checks&#x2F;</a>It is a docker based email server setup very well done.

I&#x27;ve self-hosted with a hand-rolled postfix+dovecot, and later with Mailcow&#x27;s dockerised mailserver (FOSS, good management and webmail UI, strongly recommend).More recently though I moved my personal domain to Microsoft Exchange Online - it&#x27;s a lot less flexible than Mailcow (per-head licensing, but there&#x27;s + addressing and catch-alls now) but I don&#x27;t have any of the deliverability&#x2F;gmail-spam-folder issues I used to have.Exchange P1 Online [2] is roughly the same for my single-user as my old DO droplet cost per month(edit: side-bonus you get an Azure AD tenant for your domain which is handy for SSO&#x2F;IdP things)[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mailcow.email&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mailcow.email&#x2F;</a>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-au&#x2F;microsoft-365&#x2F;exchange&#x2F;compare-microsoft-exchange-online-plans" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-au&#x2F;microsoft-365&#x2F;exchange&#x2F;compa...</a>

I use Zoho with my own domains. Haven&#x27;t had any issues so far.

Plenty of people use fastmail and seemed to be happy. If you&#x27;re OK with its price, I think that&#x27;s a sweet spot.It&#x27;s absolutely possible to host your own e-mail server on VPS. You&#x27;ll receive mail without issues. But sending mail might cause issues, so unless you&#x27;re OK with some delivery problems and spending some time to investigate, I don&#x27;t suggest going that route.Hosting your email on NAS is problematic. You need to have static IP address with PTR record and most home providers won&#x27;t offer those services for reasonable price.

&gt; Does anyone recommend any alternate providers with custom domains, or some OSS?I&#x27;m happy with Namecheap as my registrar and Mailbox.org for mail services, and have been for years (my Gmail account still exists and forwards the rare message it receives to the other one).Mailbox.org offers ordinary IMAP and SMTP access + DKIM signing for your domain. Hosted in Germany. Prices vary, I pay about €2&#x2F;month for several GB I think.Their webmail interface is bad, but then again, I&#x27;ve never seen one that isn&#x27;t. And I&#x27;ve never used it after logging in for the first time anyway.&gt; Is it possible to host your own email server on a NAS or RPi something?It&#x27;s possible, but I wouldn&#x27;t recommend it for something as critical as email. It&#x27;s not that the actual hosting is hard, it&#x27;s that more and more of the big providers are refusing to handle email messages from certain networks.

mailbox.org from me as well. I compared them with fastmail and they don&#x27;t upsell on the personal domain and let you pay as you use storage.Both have unpleasant web accessibility experience, but it is not consideration for many.

I just recently setup Zoho and seem to be working fine so far. Their web mail interface is decent but I don’t use it much.

Hosting your own email is pretty easy to get started, but without continuous work you will have problems getting good deliverability, and balancing blocking almost all spam without filtering out wanted email is tricky too

I&#x27;ve been considering getting a new email address on a personal domain so it can be more portable and I can change providers.Does anyone recommend any alternate providers with custom domains, or some OSS? Is it possible to host your own email server on a NAS or RPi something?

Their new slogan is hilarious. It&#x27;s not even one slogan, it&#x27;s three:* Respect the user* Respect the opportunity* Respect each otherThe first one is obviously a joke, because nothing says &quot;respect the user&quot; like canceling a beloved service with millions of users, or &quot;updating&quot; the product while losing half the features.The last one makes you wonder why they had to put it into a slogan. Isn&#x27;t it the baseline expectation? It&#x27;s somewhere on the level of &quot;Don&#x27;t steal your colleague&#x27;s belongings&quot; as far as slogans go.But it&#x27;s the second one that is absolutely the best, and by that, I mean the worst. Orwell would&#x27;ve had a lot to say about it. The thing is, it has absolutely no meaning in the English language. What&#x27;s next? Say hi to agility? Don&#x27;t offend capital gains? Console excellence?Of course, it doesn&#x27;t really matter. The whole thing has a mafia vibe, as Google&#x27;s slogans and culture are drifting towards loyalty rather than standing up for what&#x27;s right.--------If you want to have more fun, look at Google&#x27;s Community Guidelines[1]Compare to The Mafia Code:* Be loyal to members of the organization. Do not interfere with each other&#x27;s interest. Do not be an informer.--[Google: Treat our data with care. Don&#x27;t disseminate NTK information.]* Be rational. Be a member of the team. Don&#x27;t engage in battle if you can&#x27;t win.--[Google: follow Three Values, in particular: Respect the opportunity.]* Be a man of honor. Respect womanhood and your elders. Don&#x27;t rock the boat.--[Google: Do your part to keep Google a safe, productive, and inclusive environment for everyone.]* Be a stand-up guy. Keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut.--[Google: Discussions that make other Googlers feel like they don&#x27;t belong have no place here.]* Have class. Be independent. Know your way around the world.--[Google: You are responsible for your words and your reach.][1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.google&#x2F;community-guidelines&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.google&#x2F;community-guidelines&#x2F;</a>

Don&#x27;t Be Evil is so stupid. It&#x27;s like Disneyworld having the slogan &quot;we won&#x27;t kill your kids&quot;.

Yes, the good old Don&#x27;t Be Evil days. I&#x27;ve asked so many people if they can remember Google&#x27;s old slogan. Nobody does.

&gt; It was a different Google back then.No it has always been the same company, and we tried to tell you.

The best thing is using your own domain, then you can change your providers whenever you need to.

This is why I use one of the new, privacy-focused email providers instead. It feels like the sweet spot between starting my own server (headache, dropped messages) and being one of a billion Gmail&#x2F;Outlook users (no-one cares if I don&#x27;t get email)

I switched to a combination of ProtonMail AND using a private domain in my email address AND regularly syncing entire mailbox with my desktop client (Thunderbird). This way, if ProtonMail gives me grief, I just set up a new email account with a different provider, point domain entries to it, import my mailbox in there, and can continue as if nothing happened.

Next don’t-be-evil step: Having a Protonmail account proves that you have something to hide! Ban!

I started switching to ProtonMail for this exact reason. It’s not that I’m doing anything that would draw a purposeful or legitimate ban, but they’re so damn capricious that I fear getting my account locked because of a bug and not being able to undo it.

If you get your own domain, get one on a well-known TLD (e.g. .com, .org or your own country code). If you get a gTLD that&#x27;s not well-known, there are some endpoints that will block you because your email is &quot;not valid&quot;.

I pay Apple for my email address, although I’d prefer to run email off my own domain.

That fi TLD and &quot;1995&quot; jolted a name out of the old memory unit: anon @penet.fi.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Penet_remailer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Penet_remailer</a>

&gt; Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the customerGoogle now sells domains, as well as email through GSuite.I use them a lot on new projects, because I find them so insanely convenient, but I can&#x27;t help shake the feeling that now I&#x27;m both the product and a paying customer.So I&#x27;d probably nuance your words with: &quot;select a provider whose livelihood depends on your custom&quot;.

I can happily second the Fastmail recommendation. I self-hosted mail for 17 years and there&#x27;s nothing I want that they don&#x27;t do.

Thank you. I have been on the fence for a bit. But I will initiate project leave Gmail and Gdrive now. It will take me a year, but the deliveries and the final goal is clear.

Any thoughts on getting your own domain and then still using gmail for receive email on that domain?

I&#x27;ve had an email on a personal domain for years.But I still use my old gmail for one thing: Point of contact for the my domain registrar. Do you have any suggestions for how I can solve this?

Start the process of getting out right now.Get an email address that you own, on a domain you control. Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the customer - not the product.I did this with Fastmail and Iki.fi, a Finnish non-profit[1], who have been selling people &quot;permanent&quot; email addresses since 1995.[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iki.fi&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iki.fi&#x2F;</a>

Make sure you don’t use any of the other services: don’t post to YouTube from that account, don’t share Google Docs, files etc.

If you intend to keep using Google products, then more or less yeah, periodically. A better way is to start using Fastmail (for example) and have them import everything. Then stop using gmail.

I&#x27;ve used this project, but it&#x27;s been a while: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;joeyates&#x2F;imap-backup" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;joeyates&#x2F;imap-backup</a> . It&#x27;s a CLI app, though, so it&#x27;s maybe not the best solution for non-technical end-users.Some email providers have IMAP import, where you just give them the password and they&#x27;ll do it for you. Not the best solution in terms of security but might be ok if you&#x27;re getting rid of your account anyway.

As someone who recently did this, you can link a Fastmail account to your existing Gmail account, and it will load in any email data you have into Fastmail.  I think from there you can delete your google account provided you have Fastmail all setup properly.  It took maybe 2 minutes and was part of the guided setup Fastmail did for me.

It&#x27;s better to use Takeout than IMAP export if you&#x27;re one of the people who, for whatever reason, have Google rewriting URLs in your IMAP messages (having Advanced Protection enabled is one such trigger, I learned).It gives you all of your mail in mbox format, which is a common format.

What&#x27;s the best way to back up your data? Google Takeout? Is that easily ingestible into other email programs?

Those can get shut down in exactly the same manner.

Pay $25&#x2F;mo for GSuite enterprise if your email matters to you.

I have my own Nextcloud instance, and the iOS Nextcloud app automatically saves new pics from my phone to the server. But that means that you have to manage your own server, so it&#x27;s not everyone&#x27;s cup of tea.[1]If you are looking for a managed solution, I suggest one of those that you pay for (iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive) since usually, paid services have at least some form of customer service and something like OP&#x27;s story is less likely to happen.[1] Also, the cloud provider where I rent the server might decide to block my account for whatever reason. To minimise the risk, I&#x27;m planning to store daily server backups on a different cloud provider.

&gt; Gmail is really the only valuable thing that actually ties my life to GoogleFor me it&#x27;s google photos. While there are lot of great gmail alternatives these days there&#x27;s still nothing like google photos unfortunately, is there?

I&#x27;ve been making the switch (slowly) over the past year. Had a gmail from the early days, when it was invite only. Now moving to a combo of protonmail + custom domain, and I couldn&#x27;t be happier.

Thanks for sharing your &quot;phased transition&quot; strategy.Things aren&#x27;t all-or-nothing, and taking this sort of approach can definitely help with making such a non-trivial change.

I moved away from google a few years ago after putting it off for years because it sounded like effort. It turned out to be rather straightforward.I still have my google accounts, I just don’t use them (except YouTube unfortunately). My gmail still forwards to my new address, but I mostly just get emails where people got their own addresses wrong nowadays.What I did was: I registered a domain name from a company that i don’t use for anything else besides domain names (incidentally a local registrar who I trust and can call on the phone). I then set up a new email address (I use fastmail) using that domain name. Then I forwarded all my old emails to this new address.If someone emailed my old address, I would always reply from my new one, which slowly updated peoples address books. If I got newsletters, I would either unsubscribe and resubscribe from my new one or just unsubscribe. I did that very slowly and it took a year or so before I stopped getting any forwarded, but there’s no rush. Don’t think “oh I have to update everything at once”. Similarly, I updated services that I still use that used the old email to log in on a case by case basis as I used them.You can ditch google and it’s not as hard as it sounds!

This makes me anxious about my long time Gmail address. Back then I got it just because it and Google was cool, and their services had a good reputation. It was a different Google back then. If they had launched it this year I would never have got one because chances are it would have been cancelled by 2025. Gmail is really the only valuable thing that actually ties my life to Google. And it&#x27;s not that hard to replace, but just a bother to inform some people and update account details.

Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked