[nirvdrum]

I'll take the limited risk. I've had to contact Fastmail support and it was a breath of fresh air. It's a bit absurd that something so fundamental as email has essentially no support from a company as large as Google; it's not a bug-free product.

I suppose eliminating humans is a security win, but HN is full of stories of AI systems failing and banning accounts for essentially nothing. Not having a human to appeal to is far riskier to me. It's not like these AI systems can't be gamed to knock people offline. I'll take the risk of having humans involved -- it's far less stressful.

[remus]

> It's a bit absurd that something so fundamental as email has essentially no support from a company as large as Google; it's not a bug-free product.

I'd be willing to bet that gmail has a couple of orders of magnitude more users than fastmail while also providing a substantially bigger inbox (than the cheapest fastmail option), and providing the whole thing for free. I dont think it's surprising that they make trade-offs to support that model. Just think of how many support staff you'd need to support 1.5 billion users!

> HN is full of stories of AI systems failing and banning accounts for essentially nothing. Not having a human to appeal to is far riskier to me. It's not like these AI systems can't be gamed to knock people offline. I'll take the risk of having humans involved -- it's far less stressful.

I don't think the trade off is that simple. There are plenty of stories of support staff getting scammed in to incorrectly providing access to accounts. Is one better than the other? It's not a clear choice imo.

[988747]

>> I dont think it's surprising that they make trade-offs to support that model. Just think of how many support staff you'd need to support 1.5 billion users!

Google has a shitload of money, they can afford hiring enough staff. Cost is a lame excuse here.

[macintux]

Someone made a good point a few months ago: if you can’t afford to support your users, you have a broken business model.

[Eisenstein]

The provide support for users that pay them, and for advertisers. Their business model is to sell things, and it is working pretty well. They can certainly 'afford' it, but they don't want to, and your complaint as a 'free' tier user means little to them.

What is needed is legislation or some practiced standard regarding real-person online-id so that losing access to your email account doesn't nuke your ability to operate online in a way that requires you to verify your identity even pseudonymously.

[nirvdrum]

I've managed a Google Workplace account (~30 paid users) for over a decade and have never had support respond in less than a week. And each time I got a canned response. I just don't even bother anymore, which is likely what they want. I don't think this is a free vs paid thing. It's just the way Google operates.

[ipython]

That's weird, I have a Google Workspace account with less than 10 paid users and had several in-depth conversations with support personnel on SMTP and DNS setup issues. It was outsourced to an overseas call center, but they did respond to my queries.

That said, I have issues with spam being delivered to my organization's group aliases and I can't report the spam because it flags it against my group alias not the original sender (!) I can't turn spam filtering on the group alias because it flagged legitimate emails from our customers. So I'm kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place, with no one at Google to talk to about it.

[remus]

It depends how much money you spend with them. If you shell out for expensive support in GCP you get guaranteed response times, dedicated account reps and so on.

[Ferret7446]

They can afford to not support their free users.

[Ferret7446]

Not really. It sounds like you don't have a sense of how much it costs to hire people, how many people are needed to provide oncall support, and the scaling cost of managing and training people.

[celdon25]

My main email account was through Hotmail in 2000, and it got shut down that year due to a social engineering attack. The guy who did it even told me he was going to do it first. I didn’t get to have it covered in any mainstream news headlines either :P

[jeffbee]

> AI systems failing and banning accounts for essentially nothing.

The strongest statement you can make about the standard HN Google account outrage post is that the complainant is unaware of or unwilling to admit to the behavior that got their account suspended. Drawing the conclusion that all such complaints are false positives is not warranted by the evidence.

[nirvdrum]

Unless you're implying that the false positive rate is 0%, then it's still a concern for me. I've seen cases where the user obviously did something in error but had no chance to appeal. E.g., they uploaded a photo that got flagged and then lost access to their email, domains, YouTube content, any form of social login, etc. My email account is too important to me to risk with an automated system without an option to appeal to a human. That risk is much higher to me than someone social engineering their way into my Fastmail account.

To me, this is analogous to backing up your BitLocker key with your online Microsoft account. Is it the optimal approach to security? No, but the far more likely risk factor is losing your key locally and then losing access to all of your data. I'll take the peace of mind that comes with knowing I can speak to a human if things go sideways. As an added benefit, I've been able to speak to a human when routine service issues have come up and it's been a pleasant experience.