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.
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.
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.
The more I think about it, we really do need a more distributed architecture. The whole concept of "the cloud" really sucks
(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.
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.
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?
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)
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.
- Make periodic backups of Gmail using IMAP https://duckduckgo.com/?q=gmail+backup+migration
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.
OP might know that paid services exist, but many of them have a reputation for having worse search and fewer access options than Gmail.
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.
