But even then you have to trust FastMail not to lock you out. Sure it's a paid service so less likely and I'm sure their customer service is better. But it doesn't fix the root issue of being dependent on one party.
Google is pretty unique here. You can have a dedicated support team at Google with a multimillion dollar account, and still be wack-a-moled by Google's automated systems.
The root issue is Google. This doesn't happen with most companies. This is specific to Google's culture, which treats customers as statistics. That comes out of how Google thought about search and ads, and doesn't work for anything else.
The secondary issue is being dependent on one party.
I would say that this applies to most of the companies with hundreds of millions of users. The account flagging needs to be automated and there is still some fraction of false positives. The appeal process is not easy because the false positive users are intermixed with bad actors. The human time dealing with the appeals is limited due to the sheer numbers of users.
For me the solution is to use a paid service or a free service at smaller business where employee/user ratio is better.
To be fair, I don't think other providers like Microsoft are much better, but also note that the service is equally bad if you pay for ads or cloud.
I'm generally against too much regulation, but given how important e-mails are (access to all sorts of accounts, important messages from clients, tax, etc.), this is a case where a certain service level needs to be mandatory, e.g., unlocking within few hours.
Every time I needed support for my office365 account I got it and it was resolved quickly and professionally. The account size is very small. Microsoft is in another universe compared to google.
Fair point, I was referring to the unpaid version.
With the office 365 support I did have a minor accounting issue that they didn’t intend to fix and support tried some standard responses (I needed the billing company name to be different from the Domain/account name, which isn’t possible and the support didn’t know and asked me to do a bunch of things before I figured out through a post that it’s not possible - an edge case that isn’t too much of an issue unlike being locked out)
The bigger problem here even if you want to maintain your anti regulation stance is that a Google lockout prevents the user from acquiring the data that is rightfully theirs. If a lockout included something like a 90 or 120 day sunset period where you had read only export, even a harsh termination could at least be defensible.
That you should be able to obtain through GDPR in Europe at least, though it might be an issue to prove ownership if you didn’t provide your real name.
What doesn’t work that easily is resetting passwords without account access, especially since more services are switching to magic links instead of passwords (and the issues of managing multiple accounts in a standard browser password manager with things like slack having different sub domains and accounts for different projects)
Yeah that's just not correct. If you're paying Microsoft for an Office subscription, they will offer you support because that's your gateway into becoming a lucrative business whale of a customer. It's been that way for decades.
If you combine it with a paid domain, then you can transfer your email provider even when locked out. Of course you risk loosing your emails, but you can setup a desktop client to always download all your emails or do periodic backups.
I don't have these issues with Fastmail + custom domain, but you need to make sure that DKIM and SPF is set up correctly. Fastmail helps you to check and fix this.
My issues were with Zoho, with DKIM and SPF set up correctly. Would be interesting to see if the domain (or top-level-domain) or the e-mail provider is at fault. It's difficult to test given the number of signals that are involved in flagging a message.
That seems very odd. There's no reason why mail from any domain with good mail servers should just land in spam folders. You should investigate. Perhaps someone is sending spam using your domain?
The single time I needed support from them, I was replied by a person that understood my problem and while they didn't fix it (it was a feature request) it was added to their backlog.
The suggestion appeared live like a year after and was contacted saying it was available in case I still wanted to use it.
From Google, on the other hand, I never got a human reply to any issue. The one that pissed me off the most was that my location history pre-2015 disappeared for some reason and I was using it to geotag old photos. No response, no acknowledging of the issue, nothing.
I found a UI regression a few months back with the way threaded messages were working. Notified FM, they replied within a few hours acknowledging it was a bug and they would fix it asap. Fix was out within a few days, and they followed back to with me to confirm it was fixed for me.
You can integrate with Thunderbird for local backup, and anyway Fastmail customer service is capable and responsive.
The critique on the earlier post is a little like saying it's still a problem that you need to trust your local supermarket for food. Which is true, but still much better than relying to avoid starvation exclusively on just-in-time shipments from an automated unstaffed ACME Growers Warehouse in Nowhere, USA.
