[AnonC]

I have a tangential story on how providing a phone number isn’t going to help either.

I have an important Gmail account where I recently had to change the password (because the only password set several years ago didn’t work). Since it was important, I didn’t want to risk the account becoming inaccessible and hence provided my phone number as the recovery number. After changing the password through a browser, the iOS Mail app complained that the password for this account is invalid and that I should enter it. So I go there and flow through the Google login pages (since this is setup as a Google account), and then it repeatedly tells me that it’s incorrect and that I should recover my account. Visiting the recover account page tells me that it cannot help me at this moment!

I’m furious at how stupid Gmail (and the people in Google writing this application) can be. I haven’t accessed that account over the last few days and am hoping I can get back in after the Google bots have cooled down. I have no idea what I can do if that account becomes permanently inaccessible because some “machine learning” algorithm messed things up. :(

I’ve decided to close my Gmail accounts (these were old ones) if I can manage to download the data from those.