Considering Google’s penchant for automated emails and redirects to Help files when things go wrong, what would you do if someone hacked your Gmail account and had access to all your emails, Google documents, etc etc? [Google Blogoscoped]
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You’re hosed! I long ago gave up on trying to reach a real human at Google. They have become just another mega corp that doesn’t want to talk to their customers.
Yeah, they need a much better way to retrieve your account if you “lose” it. For some reason my account got locked out about a month ago and I had not setup a secondary email address, bad me. The original email the invite came from was no more so that route was not opened to me. I had to wait 5 days before I was prompted for my security question. I received a response from Google about 3 days after I got back into my gmail account.
Services tied to my gmail account: Checkout, Docs, Blog, and of course mail/cal.
I have since setup a secondary email address and that will not happen again. But they still need a way to retrieve it in case your account is hijacked.
I guess the good thing is that all my mail is addressed to my domain, and I use a simple forward rule in my domain administration. If someone hijacked my gmail account, I could just change the forward rule to point to a different email account.
Of course, I’d still lose access/control of all my OLD mail… (Which I at least have archived using POP/Thunderbird)
I use Gmail to host email for my own personal domain (the single active mailbox is me, myself). The minimal level of service for this feature (“Google Apps for your Domain”) is free, but they offer a paid version at $50 per user per year with more features, including “phone support for critical issues”.
You get what you pay for. Pay Google nothing and you get a system that works most of the time and you’re S.O.L. if it gets compromised in any way. Buy a personal domain and park it at Google for $50/year and you’re ENTITLED to a solution when things go wrong.
I’d change my redirects, too, but I’d be most worried about my Analytics account.
That’s probably why they still say everything’s in Beta.
I just don’t use Google. If you use THE most popular brand, you’ve just upped your chances of being a target.