Ask HN: I’m scared of losing GMail access. Do email protection laws exist?

[_pdes]

Hi, HN. The older I get, the more frightened I am of losing access to my GMail account. My trust in Google to do the right thing has diminished over time.

In the event Google decides to arbitrarily terminate my Google account, are there any email protections for me as a citizen of any country?

So much of the developed world digital life revolves around email usage. I don’t believe citizens of any nation have, in any government jurisdictions, any protection from businesses cutting off access to their email accounts. Am I wrong about this?

If not, how can I protect myself from suddenly being cut off from such a highly critical aspect of communication? The many institutions of the world intermingle government, financial, educational, utility, and other service access with the concept of an email address.

Once upon a time, GMail was a revolutionary product. I now find some of Google’s practices anti-consumer and a few business decisions of theirs a liability.

[smt88]

Your fear is rational. It's happened to other people. I would suggest going to a paid provider like Fastmail and checking their terms of service. I don't know of any protections that exist by law at the moment.

My horror story:

I have a mentally ill relative who only logged in every 6 months. He got treatment and wanted to resume using his email account. Guess what? Google thought his activity was "suspicious" and permanently locked him out. We went through an infuriating loop of proving his identity, then getting a message saying a human was reviewing it. Then we'd go back to proving his identity. This went on for 15-20 cycles over the course of 8 months.

The only way to get out of it was to contact my friend who works for Google. Otherwise my relative had lost gigabytes of irreplaceable data. We would've gladly paid $1,000+ for the privilege of talking to a real human about it, but that's impossible.

[catacombs]

That's infuriating. Something similar happened to my friend a few months ago. He couldn't log in to his Google account for weeks because the company took forever to verify his identity.

The fact Google doesn't have a way for people to talk to a human during a crisis is moronic. That's why I've moved off Google with as much stuff as possible.

I don't think I'd have the patience to deal with something like this and rely on automated systems to deal with my problems.

[surewhynat]

I logged into an old hotmail email to recover a related account, and it had deleted all my messages because I hadn't been active for 12 months.

The more I think about it, we really do need a more distributed architecture. The whole concept of "the cloud" really sucks

[jolmg]

Email is about as distributed as it gets. How would you consider it can be more distributed? If it's about the ability to backup messages, you can do that with any MRA (Mail Retrieval Agent) program like mbsync/isync[1], or offlineimap[2].

[1] http://isync.sourceforge.net

[2] http://offlineimap.org/

[throwaway156503]

Thank you for sharing this. This is one of the types of issues that I’m afraid of: the insulation Google has from its users. I don’t believe I could simply call a legal representative or get in touch with the staff of an elected official to resolve such a matter.

[quickthrower2]

I am guessing you are scared because:

(i) you won't be able to access importing accounts e.g. bank accounts where your email is your gmail account.

(ii) you won't be able to see your old emails.

Solutions

(i) Buy a domain name and use that for your emails. Forward those to GMail initially but you can forward them to something else if you ever lose GMail access. Update all your accounts to this new email address.

(ii) Use Google Takeout to download all of your Google data, including your GMail.

[jolmg]

(ii) You can also download all your mail via IMAP(S). MRA (Mail Retrieval Agent) programs like isync/mbsync, offlineimap, and others do this. They sync, so you can run them regularly to download just the new mails and keep your backups updated. Whereas using Google Takeout would give you the whole thing everytime.

[perl4ever]

The interesting thing about Gmail for me, is that I lost the ability to log in to my primary Gmail account quite some time ago (well over a year I think) and yet I still have a device that remains logged in and showing me new mail even though I don't have the password, can't send mail, and can't reset the password by any means.

I am beginning to think it is a notable security hole, as Gmail shouldn't, and surely does not in general, allow a session to last for years without timing out or requiring re-authentication.

[jobigoud]

Are you sure the password isn't saved somewhere in the mail client on the device and sent up regularly?

[perl4ever]

Possibly, although it won't send. And, you know, Google is often pretty aggressive at locking devices out if it thinks they are insecure. This is a 1st gen Kindle Fire, and I'm pretty sure it is very obsolete and not getting updates for a while. So even if it is still trying to log in, that doesn't make it expected in my mind that it would continue to work.

If it were sending the password (out over WiFi to my tethered phone) is there a way for a bear of very little brain to MITM it?

[golem14]

a) Make frequent backups via google Takeouta b) forward all your mail to a secondary account c) don't use a consumer account (@gmail.com) but pay for your domain and use [e-mail]

d) use your gmail account only for gmail and do YT, adwords etc from another google account so that if you run afoul of Terms of service on one product your gmail is not terminated also.

Only c) allows you to keep your email address after losing access to gmail. a) and b) just protect your data.

But based on anecdata, Google is unlikely to kick out users unless there's some bad behaviour (which may seem innocent to you)

[throwaway156503]

> Google is unlikely to kick out users unless there's some bad behaviour (which may seem innocent to you)

I don't believe I've ever violated any terms of service Google has ever outlined. In practice, I have nothing to worry about. This concern of mine primarily revolves around legal protections, and rights as a "digital citizen" of sorts.

[smt88]

Google Wallet is another risky service. Your payment behavior can get you banned.

[robertcope]

This is a good example of why everyone should have their own domain. Using @gmail.com or any other "mass" email domain is just not a great practice. IMHO, of course.

[throwaway156503]

I have the privilege of doing this, and have professional contacts utilize such an address. For the layman, this would take considerable effort.

[usrlocaletc]

Need to use a cloud synchronization AND a backup service/scheduled app, or switch email providers such as setting up your own domain and email server in a country like Sweden, Iceland or Ukraine.

- https://www.cloudhq.net

- Make periodic backups of Gmail using IMAP https://duckduckgo.com/?q=gmail+backup+migration

[smt88]

Ukraine is not safe from Russian influence and could possibly be annexed in coming years.

[usrlocaletc]

You're wrong because you're not applying nuance and you're trying to prognosticate. It depends on which part of Ukraine. All of Ukraine is extremely unlikely to be annexed because Putin is fairly contained by a multiplicity of international pressures. More likely, if at all, a portion of one of the Baltic states or a region around the Crimea would get take, but that's unlikely.

[sammyo]

I was thinking of basically using gmail as a filter. Get a custom domain, forward all email to gmail then read via another service.

[aquabeagle]

Do you not know there are other e-mail providers that will take your money in exchange for services?

[perl4ever]

I don't know if it's my imagination, but emails of mine sent via my domain and not gmail or outlook seem to often mysteriously vanish, and I was thinking it may be because they are flagged as spam.

There's also the issue that nothing other than gmail works very well on an android phone.

I started using email long before Google existed, but I'm not really familiar with a good alternative at this point. It's not that I wouldn't theoretically pay money for a good old fashioned email provider with human customer service, but I really don't think such a business exists anymore, due to the proliferation of free email. And a small-time automated business is going to be worse than a big-time automated business anyway. It's just not 1993 any more.

[smt88]

Gmail was revolutionary because it was, for most of its history, better than even paid email services.

OP might know that paid services exist, but many of them have a reputation for having worse search and fewer access options than Gmail.

[throwaway156503]

Correct.

[throwaway156503]

My concern is primarily that I already have this email address attached to a plethora of services, many of which I've even forgotten. I parted with an older email address many years ago when I was much younger, but now I'm faced with an account I've had for much longer, which is attached to many more important websites and software.

[pwg]

The longer you delay, the more 'critical' your existing gmail address becomes, and the more damage that can occur from a 'cutoff'.

You'd be best advised to obtain a domain, once you have that then you have a fixed email address that you own (to the extent that you 'own' the domain, but as long as you pay the yearly fee [which can be paid up for ten years at one time], you effectively do 'own' it).

Then you can begin migrating things that are attached to gmail away from gmail and to the address you own. Eventually you'll have all the very important critical items migrated, and the ones you missed you may not feel so troubled to ignore.

As for email service, you can purchase email hosting (some services have been mentioned here already) or you can self host (which is what I do with my domain). Self hosting is not that hard, but it does require a certain level of internet and networking knowledge, which if you don't have could make attempting to self host feel like a nightmare. In my case, I've had the same email address since about 1999 or 2000 (I can't remember exactly when now). It has moved across four different internet links across three ISP's in the ensuing years, but never once was I ever at risk of losing any old emails because a 'provider' decided to close down or to arbitrarily terminate an account.

[simplecomplex]

Don’t use google. Use fastmail and use the backups. Problem solved.

[probinso]

switch to an email host that you trust. Consider paying for it