How worried should I be about Google randomly suspending my accounts?

Reseller here (for a little over 10 years). We've had it happen and support channels have become worse than they ever were. There was a brief period of time I could get phone billing support with good English comprehension, but that's not possible anymore.

The last major issue I had with paid accounts is Google decided to move the goal posts a few years ago and basically make a small college course to maintain being a reseller. Originally you just needed so many licenses and a credit check. We didn't know they launched this new system and had a client hit storage limits on one of his accounts.

Any other company you'd just increase the license tier, vendor gets more money, client gets more service, everybody wins. With Google though, this isn't possible for a reseller in my situation. Support had told us to just go in and increase the license, but the option wasn't available in the redesigned panel. Instead I need to complete a course and maybe a week or so after get blessed enough to have the ability to submit a 'deal' to increase the tier for the customer's account.

Oh and it took me over a week to get this suggested resolution (that requires in best case another week). At no point did I ever feel anyone at Google gave a shit about me or any of my clients, and I regret becoming a reseller and ever recommending them.

EDIT: Use fastmail, I just wish their reseller panel was a bit more fleshed out.

Google "randomly" shutting down accounts is a result of their fraud-detection processes. It's also why they (and any cloud provider) can be so unhelpful when this happens: they're trying to protect their support tier from a DoS by fraudsters.

Every so often we loudly hear about egregious mistakes, with legitimate accounts getting shut down. This is a result of large numbers: they're hosting billions of accounts, so one-in-million mistakes happen thousands of times (and believe me, they're tuning their processes for even less than one-in-a-million mistakes)

You say you have a lot of Google accounts. This could already be a red flag in the detection processes. One obvious way to "legitimize" these accounts is to have proper 2FA setup for them. Try not to share 2FA methods (like phone numbers or Yubikeys) across them, in a way that a fraudster might do to save time/money.

You're unwittingly a bystander in a silent war going on between Google and fraudsters. Neither of them are divulging methods they're using to detect/evade, so it's hard to give advice on how to behave legitimately. Try to do things that would be expensive for a fraudster, like the above 2FA advice.

(low probability) x (high impact) = ("expected value" of catastrophe)

In risk management in general, you usually want to consider the "expected value" of the catastrophic event instead of just the impact or probability alone. The probability that you'll get locked out probably doesn't actually run that large. How much do you have tied to the account?

You should usually take low probability events of sufficiently large "expected value" catastrophe size seriously enough to mitigate the expected value.

Running your own email server is pretty easy, except for sending mail. You should probably just use a reliable relay host with a good mail reputation and relay your outgoing mail through it, and follow-up that your email gets received. This has worked pretty well for me over the years. I've only ever had one place reject my reputable-host-relayed mail with my domain on it, so I send my outgoing mail to them from gmail. You never really have a problem with incoming mail at your MX records, and out-going mail with your domain on it works easily with like 99% deliverability if you use a reputable provider as a relay.

Google or not, I would be very worried about relying on any company too much. That dependency makes you vulnerable.

Stuff happens. Companies die, get purchased, change their focus, etc. all the time.

I posted this in another thread, but it’s relevant here:

Google disabled my wife's voice number and business account for several weeks, right after she ordered new business cards, signs, and started a marketing campaign. They continued to charge her for Google ads each week.

Her accounts were re-enabled about 7 - 8 weeks later. No explanation given.

She averages 2 - 5 new customers per week, gained largely through referrals and her marketing campaigns, so Google's actions had a significant impact on her business.

Customer support was very limited, and again they provided no reason for their actions, no timeline, no nothing.

Ensure you use Google takeout to obtain a local copy of your data frequently and you’ll minimise the risk if you do get locked out

I got locked out of my google account (not suspended or banned) for security reasons. I knew the password, I had access to the recovery email but google ‘couldn’t verify that it was me’ signing in for whatever reason. I tried all the support channels and nothing worked. What did work was waiting for 2+ years and attempting to sign in again. No idea why but all of a sudden I was able to access my account again.

I'm worried enough that I just run my own services on hardware I own. My data center could shut down sure, but I would be informed, and come retrieve my hardware and find another site to host it.

Things could be destroyed, but I'm currently linking into an extra colo facility. 1U of rack space is very cheap, and I've replaced several paid services this way. all in all I'm saving money I think.

After Google's various shenanigans with Gsuite legacy my trust in Google was already low and now almost non-existent. Additionally can't add extra space to the latest free edition for legacy folks without hacking some Google drive APK.

I've moved my family domain to Microsoft 365 (I'm using a free covid trial of Teams Exploratory licence for 12 months then i'll move to M365 Business Standard as the live.com version doesn't support DKIM or multiple domains).

BTW - OWA isn't terrible anymore, feels nicer than Gmail, works fine in Chrome, Firefox, Edge etc.

I also transferred another domain to Infomaniak and i've found its interface quite nice - only miss push email on iPhone so haven't quite pointed my MX to them yet on that domain.

Only downside to my setup is the Microsoft apps like One Drive timeout when I have 1Blocker enabled on my iPhone.

Perhaps you should do a poll HN ? Maybe you could have a question for each of the major platforms ? Last week I was blindsided by an Amazon takedown for example for a product I invented over ten years ago and have been manufacturing and selling ever since. It was just removed with no explanation and at the time I couldn't even guess what I might have done wrong. It's been a week and they have me chasing my tail, I am not optimistic my business will survive.

People really get their nose out of joint about stuff like this, usually because the user is treated so damn poorly, but from a reliability engineering perspective there's really no way to get 100% guaranteed service.

Smaller non-Google cloud alternatives have you by the balls just as much as Google do, and it's not uncommon for them to go out of business or get bought out. Sometimes they'll grandfather the old accounts (Zoho Mail), but not always (Travis CI).

To get away from using a large cloud provider, you could start hosting things yourself. This of course has the risk of a bad config making your email undeliverable, or a hardware failure destroying your data. It also means that you'll need to personally put out the many (metaphorical) fires that occur with running servers.

Now, in terms of the actual numbers, I'm not sure how well studied the risks are, but anecdotally:

- I personally have never lost access to a Google account, and don't know anyone who has either.

- I have been personally screwed over by non-Google cloud providers after they get bought out/go public.

- The majority of people I know have lost data before due to an IT failure, such as accidentally overwriting a file or losing a USB stick.

So yes, while it is a bit shit, I don't think the reason Google get the bad press is because they are the riskiest option out there. Instead, it's more about the fact that they're a big target and the tiny fraction of customers who experience this had such a terrible support experience that they want to tell the entire world.

I have email on my own domain, hosted with Zoho that I use for anything important. Gmail has become like hotmail used to be- the throwaway email you use to sign up for websites that are probably going to spam you.

If you’re doing anything professionally with Google, like submitting Android apps to the play store, create a separate Google account for that. Don’t tie it to your personal one.

Cloud is just a fancy name for "someone else's computer." Other service providers are just other people's computers. My rule of thumb is: Don't store anything on someone else's computer that you would care about if it went away.

For something as important as E-mail, which is often the key to resetting my passwords on other services, I wouldn't rely on anyone but myself. Own your own domain, point the MX record to a machine you control. If that machine is a VPS (someone else's computer), be ready to fail over to your own metal, and keep backups that are in your control.

For other stuff, self host or keep backups. Family photos you care about? Self host or keep backups you control. Important documents? Self host or keep backups you control. I can't think of an online service I use where I'd lose anything I care about if I were suddenly banned from it.

Don't be the customer of a company where you can't speak a human to get issues resolved.

Useful exercise: call up some insurance brokers who offer "cyber risk" or "supply chain risk" insurance.[1] Yes, these are real things. Ask if you can get coverage against account cancellation by a vendor. Tell them the vendor is Google. Get a quote. This will tell you how much risk the insurance industry thinks is involved with relying on Google.

If the price for such insurance is too high, you probably shouldn't be relying on Google.

[1] https://www.thehartford.com/commercial-insurance-agents/reso...

Happened to me for no reason I could discern at all, twice. If you have anything important tied to it, I'd worry. Better still, put your actually important stuff on an account that you pay for somewhere else.

how many thousands of HN comments does it take for folks to finally get that the ONLY way to have any kind of personal representation in any kind of "Google shutoff" is that you pay for your email/cal/drive/etc via G Suite/Workplace. that's it. that is the ONLY way you can have any kind of "in" if you get randomly shut off by Google. you are paying for support and yes you can call that support and get some kind of answers. so many HN'ers are sore because their free legacy G Suite got shut off or got restricted somehow -- sure i get it, that sucks. but you weren't paying for it. you'd never rely on free accounts for company-critical infrastructure, so why would you do the same for your personal-critical stuff? while i do VERY MUCH sympathize with those whose entire lives were upended by their @gmail.com account being shut off effectively meaning _their entire life_ no longer being available to them, the best chance anyone has of being able to deal with a "personal Google shutdown" is actually to be paying money to them for [an/some] account[s] within G Suite/Google Workpace/whatever.

pay a vendor some money, get some kind of support.

while i am not saying if the baby penis doctor photo guy had a G Suite domain his life would be rosy right now, i am saying i think his situation would be a lot better had he been able to actually contact a real support department, something his free @gmail.com account did not afford him.

Been steadily de-Googling over the last few years. It's not just concerns over suspension, it's the fact that they are parsing all your data in order to serve you ads. I'm just becoming less comfortable with the amount of personal information I'm giving them and how they use it. Domains are cheap. It's fairly straight forward (and a worthwhile exercise) to get one and point it to a privacy respecting email provider such as ProtonMail or FastMail.

If you move away from Google, you should worry very little about Google randomly suspending your accounts.

What's the risk of starting again?

The only one I'd be careful of is Amazon. If you can't access your email and forget your password it's all over. I've had that happen.

Its impossible to talk to a support person.

more than many other risks, e.g. falling victim to a terrorist attack.

Organize your life depending on humans, not corporations.

Only humans care once you're in need.

And pay for what you use. There is no free lunch, let other live, too.

there is a long ong list you make diffecult for people any question simin.h45@yahoo.com

Very.