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demondance

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,808
I have been slowly decoupling my accounts for various services from just one of the tech companies for this reason. But half the time one of them buys the other service!

it's just not worth the convenience to put it all in one place. You shouldn't lose your Gmail over some shit that happened on YouTube.
 

KalBalboa

Member
Oct 30, 2017
7,930
Massachusetts
Yeah, the entire "avoid hiring human beings at all costs" approach to customer service at Google is bound to result in these frustrations.

It's near impossible to get legitimate, constructive help from them.
 

Lakeside

Member
Oct 25, 2017
9,216
This is one of the reasons that my Gmail account is largely a spam catcher e-Mail and nothing else.

I had one significant experience trying to get help with Google voice. Yeah, nope.
 

julian

Member
Oct 27, 2017
16,760
Yeah, the entire "avoid hiring human beings at all costs" approach to customer service at Google is bound to result in these frustrations.

It's near impossible to get legitimate, constructive help from them.
It's by design. This is also why I fucking hate Uber. They require you use an app to submit any issues and my issue was somebody kept using my email to try to make an Uber account after I'd already gotten rid of the app because of their shady tracking policies.
 

mutantmagnet

Member
Oct 28, 2017
12,401
This. As always there seems to be more to this than the tweets tell. And what company uses gmail for business? Never heard of any, but guess this might be related to different business areas. Not saying it's cool for not replying for 3 weeks, IF this is even true, which often is not the case with these kind of posts... if it's true, then there is no excuse for this and needs to be fixed asap. Never had any issues with Google support so far, always got an reply with 2-3 business days as normal consumer.

There is no question about Google replying. He said in his post Google gave him the run around. No one says this if they are being ignored. They only say this if they got in touch with reps and are constantly being bounced between different departments. In fact someone posted a tweet the team made 2 weeks ago saying they spent 10 hours with Google getting no concrete answers on what's going on.

Also I work in an industry that does a lot of b2b. It's not common but it isn't rare that people use gmail accounts for business.
 

Mendrox

Banned
Oct 26, 2017
9,439
Wrong. YouTube closed my account randomly 2 years ago without warning. Appealed it and was denied. No copyright strikes, no community guideline strikes. 27k subs and 7 years worth of videos gone, because a bot flagged my channel or something.

Same thing happened to a VTuber known as Kiara



She got hers back though.


I would be very interested in your channel. What was the name? I can ask what the exact reason was. In Kiaras case, she, like many other VTubers last year, got automatically flagged because of her super chat and the tons of people spamming stuff including her having shortened URLs in some videos. That should or is fixed since a long time. Youtube doesn't fix the AI if there is no reason to at all. They rather look at the appeals and do them case by case. What's funny is people being surprised that they are banned when they upload videos privately and only share the URL with fans that pay for that stuff. Youtube doesn't allow such things and they will notice that too. What really sucks is them not really always telling you the exact reason, but that's how they are suppose to work.
 

jalkerway

Member
Oct 27, 2017
273
What I don't get is why it so often seems to be the policy of these tech companies (Google, Playstation, Amazon, Blizzard etc) to not even give the person a specific reason why they were banned. I get the impression that more often than not it's due to something automated, and the reason why nobody says anything is no actual person at the company has the answer.

Now, sometimes it comes out later that someone did in fact break some terms of service, but even just that often seems to be a whole ordeal to get out of them.
 

StrayDog

Avenger
Jul 14, 2018
2,612
Absolutely.

This story actually freaked me out a little too. My work revolved around my Gmail account. If that suddenly disappeared one day.....man alive.

It doesn't bear thinking about.
www.thunderbird.net

Thunderbird — Free Your Inbox.

Thunderbird is a free email application that’s easy to set up and customize - and it’s loaded with great features!

Please buy a domain name... and use it to e-mail forward to the gmail. Or just use domain server to get the email using an email client.
You can get domain name for just U$9/year at namesilo.com (it offer free email forward for that price)

EDIT:
created a mini tutorial to keep your mail from gmail/outlook safe
www.resetera.com

Tutorial: Keep your mail safe (Gmail/Outlook)

VERSION: 2022-01-19 Many people depends of e-mail services like Gmail to do business and they are complete hostage of Google's grace to keep their accounts. And there is a real possibility of automatic ban from Google. And it can make your life miserable in this scenario because you will lose...
 
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entremet

You wouldn't toast a NES cartridge
Member
Oct 26, 2017
60,017
Yeah, the entire "avoid hiring human beings at all costs" approach to customer service at Google is bound to result in these frustrations.

It's near impossible to get legitimate, constructive help from them.
And they have billions of dollars too. Hyper capitalism comes at a price.
 

canderous

Prophet of Truth
Member
Jun 12, 2020
8,684
I've seen one too many horror stories about people losing access to their Google accounts. I can't imagine losing access to whats been my primary email account since like 2004. All the various accounts tied to it...inability to reset passwords to gain access...hell I am pretty sure some sites won't even let you change your email without access to your old one.

The answer might be to switch to a paid service like fastmail. Its probably better to pay for a product than let yourself be the product like you are with Google.
 

Sir Hound

Member
Oct 28, 2017
2,197
Absolutely.

This story actually freaked me out a little too. My work revolved around my Gmail account. If that suddenly disappeared one day.....man alive.

It doesn't bear thinking about.

Same - I actually downloaded a copy of my gmail today, it was only about 2GB. If you search how to do it Google offers a tool with which to do it.
 

Bus-TEE

Banned
Nov 20, 2017
4,656
www.thunderbird.net

Thunderbird — Free Your Inbox.

Thunderbird is a free email application that’s easy to set up and customize - and it’s loaded with great features!

Interesting. I'll have a look at this. Thanks.

Same - I actually downloaded a copy of my gmail today, it was only about 2GB. If you search how to do it Google offers a tool with which to do it.

Thanks. I had no idea that this was even an option. I'll look into it.
 
Apr 21, 2018
6,969
Google's customer support is the worst. It basically doesn't exists and you get sent to a user-run help forum or some call centre where you're on hold forever.

I really don't understand how the tech giants(other than MS and Apple) have such god awful customer support. Facebook has gotten slightly better if you have a popular page.
 

take_marsh

Member
Oct 27, 2017
7,263
As someone who has worked under Google as a support person, their support system is absolutely a hunk of shit. Any blame directed at the dev is unwarranted for his decision.
 

grmlin

Member
Oct 25, 2017
10,291
Germany
www.thunderbird.net

Thunderbird — Free Your Inbox.

Thunderbird is a free email application that’s easy to set up and customize - and it’s loaded with great features!

Please buy a domain name... and use it to e-mail forward to the gmail. Or just use domain server to get the email using an email client.
You can get domain name for just U$9/year at namesilo.com (it offer free email forward for that price)
I still use a google business account for this. Custom domain with gmail, works great.

It's not free anymore though I think? I don't pay anything for it, so it's a no brainer
 

Lakeside

Member
Oct 25, 2017
9,216
I've seen one too many horror stories about people losing access to their Google accounts. I can't imagine losing access to whats been my primary email account since like 2004. All the various accounts tied to it...inability to reset passwords to gain access...hell I am pretty sure some sites won't even let you change your email without access to your old one.

The answer might be to switch to a paid service like fastmail. Its probably better to pay for a product than let yourself be the product like you are with Google.

I lost access to my decades old primary account a couple years ago. It was such thst I didn't lose any data but the password resets and account ownership issues were real. I still run into this occasionally.

One account issue required me to send a copy of my driver's license and get on video chat with their support. Crazy time consuming stuff.
 

StrayDog

Avenger
Jul 14, 2018
2,612
Interesting. I'll have a look at this. Thanks.
Thanks. I had no idea that this was even an option. I'll look into it.

Please do yourself a favor and buy a domain name (full under your control) so you can setup an e-mail forward to gmail. It's just 9 dollars per year to have such control.

I still use a google business account for this. Custom domain with gmail, works great.

It's not free anymore though I think? I don't pay anything for it, so it's a no brainer

Yeah I have a free G Suite account too. But my domain is registered in another company so it is out of reach from Google :D
 

delete12345

One Winged Slayer
Member
Nov 17, 2017
19,673
Boston, MA
Please do yourself a favor and buy a domain name (full under your control) so you can setup an e-mail forward to gmail. It's just 9 dollars per year to have such control.
You're still on a whim of Gmail shutting down the email backend.

In my opinion, always have at least a total of 2 to 3 emails, when conducting business and public relations. You do not want to mix your personal account with your business accounts and ending up your personal account getting terminated in the cross-fire.
 

grmlin

Member
Oct 25, 2017
10,291
Germany
Please do yourself a favor and buy a domain name (full under your control) so you can setup an e-mail forward to gmail. It's just 9 dollars per year to have such control.



Yeah I have a free G Suite account too. But my domain is registered in another company so it is out of reach from Google :D
Of course, me too!
You're still on a whim of Gmail shutting down the email backend.

In my opinion, always have at least a total of 2 to 3 emails, when conducting business and public relations. You do not want to mix your personal account with your business accounts and ending up your personal account getting terminated in the cross-fire.
that's why you have your domain registered and "hosted" somewhere else :) Export your mail regularly and your are fine

Edit: I used fastmail.fm before I switched to gmail. Would probably go back to them , they did a good job, too.
 
Nov 14, 2017
2,068
Yeah something similar happened when I got a new phone and couldn't remember my Google account password. The support was basically was like "We'll email you once we unlock your account" and I was just stuck screaming into the void because I didn't have access to my email.

Luckily, I was able to remember it after a few hours and got logged in but there was a brief moment where I thought I'd have to start from scratch.
 

StrayDog

Avenger
Jul 14, 2018
2,612
You're still on a whim of Gmail shutting down the email backend.

In my opinion, always have at least a total of 2 to 3 emails, when conducting business and public relations. You do not want to mix your personal account with your business accounts and ending up your personal account getting terminated in the cross-fire.

If you have an e-mail client with your mails is not a big deal. You just create an account in another email service and change the e-mail forward to the new address. And keep using the e-mail client as usual. The old mails are store in your computer, the new mails will be retrieved from your new email providor by email client and you move on without much problem.
You just need to backup your email client often (use portable version of the email client to make really easy to make a backup: just copy a directory) so you never lose anything.
 

Syriel

Banned
Dec 13, 2017
11,088
Interesting. Personally thought that gmail is pretty to non existent for businesses since email servers etc. are pretty cheap, also for small businesses. Really thought that gmail etc. almost 100% retail users. Thanks.

GSuite (GMail w/a custom domain) is super common for business users.

That's why when Google has downtime, it's news. Lots of companies have no email access when GMail goes down.
 

Rackham

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
8,532
I had to get access to a guys email for this construction company. The company was dumb and let a bunch of important clients and important emails be sent and used on that particular address with no backup. The guy who was responsible for that email address went back to India and wasn't reachable and never left the password or recovery options available for the account.

I emailed google and gave them a list of some of the most recent emails, explained the situation and had access to the email in maybe 15 minutes.

Sucks for this guy and 3 weeks without any response is absolute bullshit and I'm glad that wasn't the case when I needed their support. Just my experience with google support
 

Nzyme32

Member
Oct 28, 2017
5,245
After over 3 weeks, yeah, can't fault the dev here. A good reminder of what can happen with any online accounts
 

hyouko

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,211
This. As always there seems to be more to this than the tweets tell. And what company uses gmail for business? Never heard of any, but guess this might be related to different business areas. Not saying it's cool for not replying for 3 weeks, IF this is even true, which often is not the case with these kind of posts... if it's true, then there is no excuse for this and needs to be fixed asap. Never had any issues with Google support so far, always got an reply with 2-3 business days as normal consumer.

Also for someone that doesn't want support any platform of Google, he still seems fo feel comfortable having Terraria on the PlayStore / Android in general.
A shitload of companies use Google Workspace (formerly G Suite), which includes gmail / drive / youtube / docs. I don't know if the dev in question here was using one of these paid accounts, and possibly if not he should have been, but that in no way excuses their behavior toward him. There's plenty of evidence throughout the thread of this being a long-running problem with them and your personal experience with Google doesn't nullify that.

Given it sounds like this started on Youtube, it may be that old story of fraudulent DMCA claims shutting someone down. Google really needs to get their shit together on that front.
 

Dreamwriter

Member
Oct 27, 2017
7,461
What I don't get is why it so often seems to be the policy of these tech companies (Google, Playstation, Amazon, Blizzard etc) to not even give the person a specific reason why they were banned. I get the impression that more often than not it's due to something automated, and the reason why nobody says anything is no actual person at the company has the answer.

Now, sometimes it comes out later that someone did in fact break some terms of service, but even just that often seems to be a whole ordeal to get out of them.
It's because often it *is* something automated which initially caught it, and they don't want to tip possible bad actors off about how to avoid being caught by avoiding the algorithm.
 

evilmonkey

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,481
Canada
For consumer accounts the only resources available are the automatic account recovery process and the forums. To talk to an actual person you need a business or education account. Even if you have the latter, they won't be able to help you with consumer account issues. You're pretty much always at the mercy of the automated system.
 

evilmonkey

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,481
Canada
I still use a google business account for this. Custom domain with gmail, works great.

It's not free anymore though I think? I don't pay anything for it, so it's a no brainer
You're still on the same boat as this guy. If you have issues with your account you'll need to upgrade to the paid version to get support, and at that point you won't be able to return to the free edition. The consumer accounts can also use a mail client for email backup.
 

hikarutilmitt

Member
Dec 16, 2017
11,409
Every time I see these, every single time, regardless of the company it's for/against, I want to know the whole story behind it. Having worked support in some capacity for 13+ years and seen these happen, including the company I worked for in question being on the receiving end of a social media "tirade" (quotes are specifically chosen) they are rarely justified or even handled/approached correctly by the complainer. There's also a tendency to become more and more worked up about trying to resolve the problem and thus not keeping a level head and making the situation worse.

It could also be support requests being in a very, very, very long queue and any number of things pushing them back further (like, ya know, Covid making most people WFH lately). A handful of other examples of this happening are also minor evidence against it, too, since we're talking a dozen or so people having this bad of an issue among who knows how many millions of accounts, some of which have likely had issues and most of which were likely solved quickly and easily.

This is also pointing out a very good practice when you're doing relying on a service like this for your personal and business accounts: don't mix them. Make a new one, publish through that. If you really want all of your emails mixed in, use an email client or forward one to the other, don't use your personal for business and personal both or shutting down one for any reason means the other is also completely screwed.
 

CrichtonKicks

Member
Oct 25, 2017
11,186
It could also be support requests being in a very, very, very long queue and any number of things pushing them back further (like, ya know, Covid making most people WFH lately).

I'm sorry but considering the essential nature of email, cloud support, etc in the modern world there is zero excuse for any delay that spans into the weeks. Given Terraria's success I'm sure the company is just fine but this is the type of thing that could put a smaller company out of business.
 

Hailinel

Shamed a mod for a tag
Member
Oct 27, 2017
35,527
Every time I see these, every single time, regardless of the company it's for/against, I want to know the whole story behind it. Having worked support in some capacity for 13+ years and seen these happen, including the company I worked for in question being on the receiving end of a social media "tirade" (quotes are specifically chosen) they are rarely justified or even handled/approached correctly by the complainer. There's also a tendency to become more and more worked up about trying to resolve the problem and thus not keeping a level head and making the situation worse.

It could also be support requests being in a very, very, very long queue and any number of things pushing them back further (like, ya know, Covid making most people WFH lately). A handful of other examples of this happening are also minor evidence against it, too, since we're talking a dozen or so people having this bad of an issue among who knows how many millions of accounts, some of which have likely had issues and most of which were likely solved quickly and easily.

This is also pointing out a very good practice when you're doing relying on a service like this for your personal and business accounts: don't mix them. Make a new one, publish through that. If you really want all of your emails mixed in, use an email client or forward one to the other, don't use your personal for business and personal both or shutting down one for any reason means the other is also completely screwed.
These are all good points. He may very have a case that his account was wrongfully suspended, but screaming "I didn't do anything wrong!" on Twitter doesn't really answer anything, either in terms of whether he actually did nothing wrong (knowingly or not). Surely he has a contact at Stadia that he could have explained this to? It's possible that he was unfairly screwed, but all the same, just because he's the one screaming about the monolithic, evil corporation doesn't mean he wasn't at fault for anything that might have gotten his account flagged.

All that being said, yeah. Don't rely on one email for everything.
 

Sulik2

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
8,168
Interesting. Personally thought that gmail is pretty to non existent for businesses since email servers etc. are pretty cheap, also for small businesses. Really thought that gmail etc. almost 100% retail users. Thanks.

Gsuite is an entire line of business apps that's an office 365 competitor run by Google. Business use google email services all the time. Hosting your own email servers is rapidly dying as cloud email hosting is fantastic at this point.

In this case though it sounds like the dev signed up his google developer account using his personal Gmail account 15 years ago, not that Gmail was his business email. Google's ass backwards policies just mean if your dev account gets suspended it then kills your personal account you signed up with.
 

KatieKatsup

Prophet of Regret
Member
Oct 27, 2017
964
www.thunderbird.net

Thunderbird — Free Your Inbox.

Thunderbird is a free email application that’s easy to set up and customize - and it’s loaded with great features!

Please buy a domain name... and use it to e-mail forward to the gmail. Or just use domain server to get the email using an email client.
You can get domain name for just U$9/year at namesilo.com (it offer free email forward for that price)
.
 
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Bahlor

Member
Oct 25, 2017
541
Germany
The Google Play version is done by a different dev studio and published by 505 (I'm not sure if Re-Logic or 505 holds the IP). It sounds like the stadia version would have been a self-published direct port of the PC version.

Thanks for pointing that out, that sure would explain it and make sense.

Gsuite is an entire line of business apps that's an office 365 competitor run by Google. Business use google email services all the time. Hosting your own email servers is rapidly dying as cloud email hosting is fantastic at this point.

In this case though it sounds like the dev signed up his google developer account using his personal Gmail account 15 years ago, not that Gmail was his business email. Google's ass backwards policies just mean if your dev account gets suspended it then kills your personal account you signed up with.

Thanks for the information. I'm working with a lot of companies as we're b2b focused and have yet to see it. Storing my business stuff in the cloud sounds just wrong IMO. But ya, quite obviously there is a big market based on this thread. Maybe just not common in the branches I'm working, so I guess it might be a bubble issue I'm not aware of it ^^
 

Vexidus

Member
Nov 22, 2017
45
I can't even imagine being locked out of your primary email that your accounts are tied to. The thought of it is very unsettling.

I would like to know the reason behind this. Is YouTube collateral damage only a concern if your videos are monetized? I have YouTube videos that include copyrighted songs but the videos were either running ads for the companies that own the songs, or were blocked from several/all countries depending on the songs. I have not tried to dispute any of these claims because the songs aren't my property of course. But would something as simple as this, potentially threaten the rest of my google stuff like gmail?
 

MrWindUpBird

Banned
Oct 28, 2017
3,686
This. As always there seems to be more to this than the tweets tell. And what company uses gmail for business? Never heard of any, but guess this might be related to different business areas. Not saying it's cool for not replying for 3 weeks, IF this is even true, which often is not the case with these kind of posts... if it's true, then there is no excuse for this and needs to be fixed asap. Never had any issues with Google support so far, always got an reply with 2-3 business days as normal consumer.

Also for someone that doesn't want support any platform of Google, he still seems fo feel comfortable having Terraria on the PlayStore / Android in general.
You're on some next-level shit if you think they would pull the game from the Play store when they're making money on it. Your posts in here trying to play damage control for Google are embarrassing.
 

hikarutilmitt

Member
Dec 16, 2017
11,409
I'm sorry but considering the essential nature of email, cloud support, etc in the modern world there is zero excuse for any delay that spans into the weeks. Given Terraria's success I'm sure the company is just fine but this is the type of thing that could put a smaller company out of business.
To more points:

We don't know the "level" of account he has, in this case. Certainly not an enterprise account and just having a developer account for Stadia doesn't necessarily mean you're a partner or that that particular badge on an account means you get special treatment/escalation privileges depending on your revenue. It's a cold, hard truth of the world of support, but it is a truth nonetheless. Yes, it taking this long to actually resolve, if it ever does get resolved, is a bit much, but we don't know the actual workings of their support structure. I'm absolutely not going to make claims of such, given both their size and the amount of data being pushed at any given time.

We don't know how often he's been in contact with them, either, nor how many actual attempts have been made other than just saying it was suspended, someone may have looked into it and then he threw his hands up because there's a lot going on with it. He has to remain in contact and civil if he wants to get anything done and we have no proof either direction that this is the case.

You're on some next-level shit if you think they would pull the game from the Play store when they're making money on it. Your posts in here trying to play damage control for Google are embarrassing.
Some of us aren't trying to shill or damage control for Google with this. We just don't see the need to pitchforks like most of the users in this thread, solely because we don't have all of the information and have at least some experience in a related field of how and why this could potentially go wrong.
 

samred

Amico fun conversationalist
Member
Nov 4, 2017
2,585
Seattle, WA
Some context from our longtime Google expert Ron Amadeo:

arstechnica.com

Terraria developer cancels Google Stadia port after YouTube account ban

Hit indie game developer tells Google, "Doing business with you is a liability."

Spinks says his entire Google account has been down for three weeks now, and Google has "done nothing but given me the runaround." You can view the quality of Google's support on Twitter for yourself. After the tweet from the official Terrarria account, YouTube support declined Re-logic's request to try to solve the problem privately, choosing instead to publicly offer irrelevant suggestions to the game developer with over 30 million customers. First, YouTube asked if Re-Logic could access its banned email account, which the developer already explained was banned. Then, YouTube suggested trying Google's account recovery system, which is only for users who have forgotten their Google password. Finally, YouTube shared instructions for how to recover a voluntarily deleted Google account, which is in no way relevant to an account ban.

For many people, a Google account ban is an online death sentence, and it's also a punishment doled out without much recourse for the victim. How would you even begin to dispute a Google account ban when the first thing that happens is your Gmail stops working? If you happen to be a famous indie developer with a hit game in development for Google's streaming service, publicly canceling your game on Twitter is probably a good way to get your case heard.