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by jcr 4863 days ago
Actually contacting someone at Google is notoriously difficult, and unfortunately, it's intentionally difficult. At their scale, there's no way Google could provide support for all the countless billions of people using their services.

In some ways, Google is fairly bad about following standards. On normal mail servers, if you send to a non-existent address, the server will reply to let you know about your mistake. Google doesn't do this. The reason they don't has something to do with their spam handling, and the costs of spam handling, but it's still against the conventions of email to not let people know that the address they used doesn't exist.

If you are really lucky, the wrong address your Mom used does not exist, and the message she sent was never saved or seen.

The only way you could test if the account exists is to try registering the mistaken address.

Well, I've possibly lied a little bit; Google supposedly saves everything, including spam, so even if the email could not be delivered since the address doesn't exist, google may still have a copy of the message sitting somewhere.

If the mistaken address is actually real, then attempting to track down and contact its owner might be helpful. The odds of success are bad, but it can sometimes work. Call me overly optimistic, but I like to believe most people are good and would help you out.

Good Luck!

1 comments

> At their scale, there's no way Google could provide support for all the countless billions of people using their services.

Google does not deserve such charity - plenty of companies with far more customers have figured out how to support them, Google explicitly chooses not to.

Fedex, UPS, DHL, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, Wal-Mart, Pizza Hut, Dominos Pizza, MacDonalds, KFC, Burger King, Subway etc, just off the top of my head.

You can literally talk to United Airlines, one of the most incompetent companies in the world, and get a response and resolution.

A single ticket on United costs far more than I'll ever pay for the gmail service I use on a daily basis - this might well be true even if you take into account revenue from ads I click on. Facebook aren't exactly known for being responsive to this sort of customer problem either.
Google's worth 40 times what United is so obviously their margins are just fine.
Or there market is much greater?
Either way they are making more money than most companies and choose to provide less support than shitty companies.