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.<p>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.<p>Every day I'm locked out things get worse.<p>Does anyone have any tips for contacting Google, maybe talking to a human being?<p>Thank you HN
A few years back, I got locked out of my primary gmail account due to a 2 factor authentication SNAFU. I was never able to recover it. I tried to go through the appropriate support channels more than once. Filled out extensive forms, even identified recent emails like they asked, to no avail. It was very disappointing, considering I had spent a good amount of money purchasing apps/ games etc. with that account. What a waste.<p>Unless you get rescued here by a personal favor of a Googler, I would imagine that account is good as dead.
Why does everyone seem to be glossing over the fact they said 'suspended for nonpayment'?<p>And it doesn't seem like they're trying to pay their bill, but just get that one email out of the account...<p>Maybe google isn't in the wrong here.
Somewhat related... At our company we once deleted a G Suite account that had a balance on its AdSense account. They let us delete the account with a click of a button without checking if all the associated accounts for other Google products should actually be deleted. So we received a letter that the account was sent to collections, but there was no way to login and pay the bill because the account didn't exist anymore. Eventually we got ahold of support and had them link the AdSense account to another Google account so it could be accessed. Theres a lot of systems at play with Google and I imagine stuff like this is overlooked quite often.
How many other struggling businesses are facing the the same issue but don’t know about the “get on the HN front page” back-channel to human tech support?
> may take 7 days<p>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.
We had this with one of our employees. Email was locked for 2 weeks due to a bug on google's end. Was impossible to get support even if you have a paid account and a relatively large team.
A recommendation going forward: make sure to host emails on a domain you control yourself. This will allow to change service provider for mail hosting when they act like this.
Relying on Google for any business seems like potential suicide. When they decide you violated whatever they come up with, you are basically fucked. That is the reason why I never used Google+ - they were deleting people's email accounts. I hope they won't delete my email because of this comment ;)
I've had this happen in the past. I used another GSuite account I had access to to get a phone support PIN and actually got someone on the phone and then kept calling back until I got a rep who would work with me on the account I did not have access to.
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU<p>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!).<p>God bless everyone on this site. You saved me.
This. Unless you are big enough to have a customer engineer assigned to you, as good as their services are I see people having similar issues again and again with their lack of support
This kind of articles make me think that it must be a good decision to not use 2 FA after all. I originally disabled it to test aerc (<a href="https://aerc-mail.org" rel="nofollow">https://aerc-mail.org</a>)
If you used a desktop or mobile app, they download a backup of emails locally. If you're just trying to read an old email, you could check your phone or computer's mail app to find the local copy.
Does Google Takeout <a href="https://takeout.google.com/?pli=1" rel="nofollow">https://takeout.google.com/?pli=1</a> work in this cases? And does GDPR can be applied in this cases?