7 ms·
Ask HN: I'm a small business and Google locked me out
I'm the owner of small construction business and I need to get access to an old gmail for recovery purposes that Google has suspended for nonpayment.
I can't get a hold of anyone at the same time that my email is more important than ever. Google suggests to "contact their support, may take 7 days" even after I successfully entered the phone 2FA and a recovery email code.
Every day I'm locked out things get worse.
Does anyone have any tips for contacting Google, maybe talking to a human being?
Thank you HN
- dylz 6y ago> may take 7 days This is one of the things at minimum that fends off takeover accounts from people demanding immediate access and faking urgency, while also notifying all associated accounts that someone is trying to recover access and giving them time to respond.
- BlackJack 6y agoPlease email me (email in profile) and I will try to get you support internally.
- folli 6y agoAs respectable as your involvement in the situation is, this is exactly how it's not supposed to work. It seems that the only way for a small business to get in contact with someone at Google is to raise hell on social media (or HN) and to wait for someone to take mercy on you.
- ijidak 6y agoI agree, I don't understand why such wildly profitable tech companies willfully ignore live support... I mean, even a paid option. As a business, I would gladly pay $99 for a phone call if I have a high-pri issue. I remember using that when Microsoft had something like that years ago. If they did that, high-priority support can be a profit center (or at least break even) if they're really that worried about costs.
- zozbot234 6y agoTo be fair, both GSuite (business oriented) and Google One (for end users) come with paid support. Not sure to what extent this includes recovering a locked-out account, but it's a thing.
- user5994461 6y agoIn a company using Google Apps for Business, administrators can reset any user account.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago> It seems that the only way for a small business to get in contact with someone at Google is to raise hell on social media (or HN) I'm intrigued by the implication that HN is not social media.
- TimTheTinker 6y agoHN is the only very large, threaded comment forum I know of that is still (a) anonymous, and (b) actually has excellent content in the comments. In my own opinion, the signal/noise ratio is nearly 2 orders of magnitude greater than places like reddit (or perhaps the mathematically correct formulation is that the noise/signal ratio is nearly 2 orders of magnitude less at HN). I credit the excellent, thoughtful moderators at HN for that.
- wolco 6y agoWhat part of hn remind you of social media?
- thaumasiotes 6y agoEvery part of it, with no exceptions. It's a website where you register an account and interact with the other accounts socially. Contrast Netflix, where you consume fixed content, or Amazon, where you buy things.
- wolco 6y agoSocial media also includes the social profile (with info about you)/friends (followers/watchers),sharing, personalized feeds. This is more like your local news site. Articles are presented with comments below. Comments can be from real people but anyone can use a fake name. And who gave the comment rarely matters.
- filmgirlcw 6y agoI’m not going to defend the lack of live customer support — especially in cases that are largely automated (like Google), but even when you do have live customer support — social media or other ways of escalating/raising a signal is often necessary. In a perfect world, it wouldn’t be — but if you are a very large company (or have millions or tens of millions of users), it’s often not possible to have live support staff who have the knowledge to handle every issue. It’s not just about paying for it either — if you have tens of millions of customers, support doesn’t scale that way, irrespective of cost (if you pay more you can generally get people more committed to gaining the knowledge to offer good support, but you still have a relative fixed number of “good enough” candidates). And that doesn’t even account for the fact that a vast majority of questions/calls are for issues that can either be automated or handled by less-skilled/lower-paid support. In the face of those realities, using external platforms to act as a signal boost/triage for the most critical issues isn’t necessarily the worst thing. Nine or ten years ago, I visited Delta’s headquarters to see how they were using Twitter to inform and re-define their customer service experiences. Airlines were some of the first industries to scour social media for issues to handle in real time and to go from being reactive (you have an issue and use Twitter to complain), to proactive (you’re invited to reach out over Twitter DMs or Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp) and I think they’ve actually done a good job. (I’d be curious to see what it has been like for airlines the last month as there have been unprecedented cancellations and support volumes are flooded across contact points). I have to give Delta immense credit, even a decade ago, they were doing phenomenal work in the space. I’m a Diamond Medallion, which means I theoretically get highest-priority phone support — and the agents on the phone are fantastic for helping me with complicated itineraries or rebookings), but for many things (like applying a regional upgrade certificate), I just DM the Twitter account because it is faster and it is a way the agent can work with multiple customers at once. It would be great if all small businesses had a direct line to their vendors, but in the absence of that (which isn’t realistic), at least there is a way to boost the signal and get attention.
- SkyBelow 6y agoIsn't that how our society works in general? Say you are the victim of a crime. You can't really do anything about it except appeal to the authorities. They will generally take pity on you and try to enforce the law, but often enough they don't and they have discretion not to. You have no other recourse for justice if they take the route of not enforcing the law other than appealing to the public or to a higher authority. Many victims of crimes have had the existing system fail them in this fashion.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jtwaleson 6y agoHN is the only place you can get Google support. Thanks for the effort, but you guys should seriously fix that, and not by shifting into your "let's automate this and do it smarter" mindset. It does not work.
- sct202 6y agoI don't know why they can't just hire a bunch of people to take care of stuff like this, like this is so ridiculous that I'm pretty sure someone could make a successful start-up to pay Googlers to enter internal tickets on behalf of people having issues with Google accounts/services.
- glitchc 6y agoIt’s obvious that Google doesn’t want to incur the cost of client support staff.
- luckylion 6y agoI'm sure that lots of people would be happy to pay good money for plenty of support issues if that meant not having to use the terrible Google help pages and issue forms, and not having to wait a week or ten for a response.
- glitchc 6y agoAgreed. It's the main reason why I've refrained from using Google for business activities, otherwise it would be a no-brainer. If something breaks, I need to be able to call or email someone and receive a response within 24 hours. Anything else is just not tenable from a reliability perspective.
- v7p1Qbt1im 6y agoIf you use Google services for business activities you‘d presumably pay for a support tier. For the consumer side I suspect, with over 2 billion users, it‘s pretty much impossible to offer human support at scale. That‘s not even taking into account malicious actors that would use the support as an attack vector. I might be mistaken. Is there an example of a company with that big a user base which offers human support for everyone?
- zerr 6y agoWhy you are not hiring proper support staff?
- amelius 6y agoBecause they can get away with it.
- speedgoose 6y agoWell, many people say Google will never catch back Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud market due to their terrible reputation.
- TimTheTinker 6y agoDon't trust the machine if you don't trust the person who made it.
- dang 6y agoAll: it's understandable that commenters react with generic indignation about how things shouldn't work that way, but please let's not pile on a user who's trying to help another user. It stacks up into the wrong incentive. After doing this once or twice and running into a buzzsaw of protest, who would want to it again? Also, these comments appear mechanically and interchangeably every time the topic comes up, which means they're not the greatest for intellectual curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
- marketgod 6y agoYou are an awesome person.
- gbenzzz 6y agoI've had this happen in the past. I used another GSuite account I had access to to get a phone support PIN and actually got someone on the phone and then kept calling back until I got a rep who would work with me on the account I did not have access to.
- Angeo34 6y agoLesson learned: Dont rely on American companies.
- dang 6y agoPlease don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments here. Nationalistic flamewar is particularly unwelcome. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- tyoma 6y agoHow many other struggling businesses are facing the the same issue but don’t know about the “get on the HN front page” back-channel to human tech support?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mathgenius 6y agoStartup idea: backup your google everything.
- icedchai 6y agoI back up all my gmail locally with "gmvault". I am not affiliated, other than a satisfied user: http://gmvault.org/ http://gmvault.org/
- ijidak 6y agoI recently learned about takeout.google.com to backup your Google everything! So happy they provide this service!
- amelius 6y agoIf only I could put it into my crontab ...
- filmgirlcw 6y agoYou can’t automate it with cron, but Google Takeout does let you schedule exports every two months (six a year), and you can choose to have the file added to a cloud drive or have a download link emailed. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than it was. For mail, there are some really good command-line backup implementations that’s you can automate with cron. When I worked in a GSuite workplace, I used gmvault to backup my inbox every week (IMAP would work too but I was paranoid and my inbox was crucial to my job). Apparently there is now a better alternative than that but for mail anyway — and likely files in GDrive — there are options.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tschellenbach 6y agoWe had this with one of our employees. Email was locked for 2 weeks due to a bug on google's end. Was impossible to get support even if you have a paid account and a relatively large team.
- ehutch79 6y agoWhy does everyone seem to be glossing over the fact they said 'suspended for nonpayment'? And it doesn't seem like they're trying to pay their bill, but just get that one email out of the account... Maybe google isn't in the wrong here.
- mattl 6y agoMaybe that one email is the login info to their bank?
- inetknght 6y agoThere are other avenues to deal with your bank.
- zozbot234 6y agoThose avenues tend to involve being physically present at some bank branch (or perhaps an ATM). Something that's not really feasible in the time of Corona.
- irishcoffee 6y agoI mean, maybe? I call my banks to do all manner of things all the time.
- madsbuch 6y agoA recommendation going forward: make sure to host emails on a domain you control yourself. This will allow to change service provider for mail hosting when they act like this.
- wtmt 6y agoThe OP is talking about a paid service, which I presume isn’t a gmail.com address (otherwise why the suspension for non-payment?). To add to your advice, just having an own domain doesn’t help if you don’t download and store all mails on a computer or other device so that you don’t have to resort to a server to get older content you need whenever you need it.
- madsbuch 6y agoOf cause it helps. It just doesn't provide your old mails.
- itake 6y agoIf you used a desktop or mobile app, they download a backup of emails locally. If you're just trying to read an old email, you could check your phone or computer's mail app to find the local copy.
- minichiello 6y ago+1
- 40four 6y agoA few years back, I got locked out of my primary gmail account due to a 2 factor authentication SNAFU. I was never able to recover it. I tried to go through the appropriate support channels more than once. Filled out extensive forms, even identified recent emails like they asked, to no avail. It was very disappointing, considering I had spent a good amount of money purchasing apps/ games etc. with that account. What a waste. Unless you get rescued here by a personal favor of a Googler, I would imagine that account is good as dead.
- zozbot234 6y ago2 factor authentication (w/ security tokens, mobile "apps" etc.) comes with an inherent risk of getting locked out of stuff. Most of the time you can mitigate that risk by generating "recovery" codes in advance, but it's still something to be aware of.
- 40four 6y agoYeah for sure, It was kind of my fault. It all happened very quickly, I think 2FA was relatively new at the time. I kept getting ‘recommendations’ from Google to enable it to be more secure. As a dutiful user I obliged, and downloaded the authenticator app. I think it gave me 10 one time recovery codes, but of course I didn’t back them up externally :) I was having some performance issues with my Samsung phone at the time, and a couple days later, did a factory reset. Then when it came back on and I tried to log into my google account, my stomach sank to the floor when I realized I could not get in without the authenticator app. That was that. Everything gone. What an idiot :) Couldn’t even get on through a computer without the stupid codes I could no longer generate. Answered all the questions, identified specific emails, personal info etc. Google was not impressed.
- zozbot234 6y ago> I kept getting ‘recommendations’ from Google to enable it to be more secure. Yes, this is problematic in itself. Hardware-based 2FA is not an unqualified win; I definitely would not want to use it without some very robust contingency plans of what to do if my authentication device gets bricked or otherwise malfunctions.
- candiodari 6y agoDoesn't Google takeout remain functional even for locked accounts ? You can download anything in that mail account even when it's blocked.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tachometr 6y agoRelying on Google for any business seems like potential suicide. When they decide you violated whatever they come up with, you are basically fucked. That is the reason why I never used Google+ - they were deleting people's email accounts. I hope they won't delete my email because of this comment ;)
- badrabbit 6y agoThis. Unless you are big enough to have a customer engineer assigned to you, as good as their services are I see people having similar issues again and again with their lack of support
- cyral 6y agoSomewhat related... At our company we once deleted a G Suite account that had a balance on its AdSense account. They let us delete the account with a click of a button without checking if all the associated accounts for other Google products should actually be deleted. So we received a letter that the account was sent to collections, but there was no way to login and pay the bill because the account didn't exist anymore. Eventually we got ahold of support and had them link the AdSense account to another Google account so it could be accessed. Theres a lot of systems at play with Google and I imagine stuff like this is overlooked quite often.
- gorbachev 6y agoYahoo is/was the same. I deleted my Yahoo (email) account, but they didn't delete the Yahoo Groups account tied to that account. I couldn't access Yahoo Groups, but I was still receiving Yahoo Groups messages on all groups I'd set it to forward posts to my email or notify me of things. No way to unsubscribe or change settings.
- dhosek 6y agoWell at least now that Yahoo has shut down groups, that problem has gone away.
- wtmt 6y agoIt’s not completely shutdown. [1] > On February 1, 2020, Yahoo! removed online access to discussions and all other features except simple membership management, essentially turning all groups into mailing lists. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Groups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Groups
- TheDesolate0 6y agoYou might have to file a lawsuit and then you might be able to get it through discovery.
- kujaomega 6y agoDoes Google Takeout https://takeout.google.com/?pli=1 https://takeout.google.com/?pli=1 work in this cases? And does GDPR can be applied in this cases?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- CoreSet 6y agoTHANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU I can't tell you how grateful I am. I'm actually a little emotional, thinking of all the people who upvoted this post until it got in front of the people it needed to (and thanks so much Aayush!). God bless everyone on this site. You saved me.
- RMPR 6y agoThis kind of articles make me think that it must be a good decision to not use 2 FA after all. I originally disabled it to test aerc (https://aerc-mail.org https://aerc-mail.org)
- userm0d 6y agoThis seems to happen more and more often.