Good luck trying to get in touch with Google if you need help. As a sad indicator of how successful they've become, you'll find (once you begin looking) there there are absolutely zero "email us" links to be found in their entire kingdom of websites.
It always feels good when you grab an address or username that isn't taken. No one wants to actually be Walter567256@whatever.com. My beautiful, pristine ixobelle@gmail.com, which I used for everything that I didn't want to use rericksen@gmail.com for, has apparently been shut down. I'm not sure when it happened, only that this morning, when I tried to manually sign into it, it was gone.
All mail I got there was set to forward to my "real" gmail account anyway, and be flagged as coming from the ixo account, which was an elegant way of saying 'this came from the blog', or 'this was basically internet username-y related'. I use ixobelle everywhere I go on the big dark interwebs, from Steam to Tapatalk to Formspring to... whatever. It's available 99.9% of the time, as I was happy to discover when I went about making a blog, registering my URL, and setting up gmail.
Now one of those pillars has collapsed, and it's awkward in a very weird sort of way. I could happily register ixobelle01@gmail.com, but it isn't the same. Ixobelle is the name I've chosen for myself, and now the powers that be have decided I can't have that back. It's weird when you think of Google as the Department of Motor Vehicles, which they of course are not. But now they hold this... thing... out of arm's reach, but it's MINE.
I of course realize that it is not mine. It never was mine. In the same way Blizzard is entitled to do whatever they want with "their" purple (yellow now?) pixels, or ebay can happily shut down "your" account any time it damn well pleases. None of this is ours, and maybe it's a good thing they took this from me. I own the URL ixobelle.com, but it's sitting on google's blogger. I could host my own mailserver somewhere and give myself ixo@ixobelle.com, but setting up mail is a punishment I don't want to inflict on myself. In a twist, I could have gmail host my domain's email, but there we are again at the Department of Motor Vehicles... handing over more, when perhaps I should be scooping up and holding it myself.
I use Google for a bazillion things. They're my photo archival system. Every photo of my kids is up there on Google+, marked as unviewable my anyone but my wife and I, but UP THERE, in case my house burns down and all the DVD backups are destroyed. Videos are up on YouTube, similarly marked as private, but in *their* cloud. My email at rericksen@gmail.com dates back to ... ohhh... let's see.... sort by date... 5/10/06. The oldest being a message from my wife saying I forgot my bentou at home.
The recovery page is intentionally vague, and leads nowhere. I mean, it makes sense... who the fuck is Ixobelle? I could probably make a case that it is me based on WHOIS records for ixobelle.com, or the fact that address forwarded to my rericksen account, but imagine I lost jumpyfrog@gmail.com (not actually mine, but I'm sure someone has it), how the fuck could I prove I'M JUMPY FROG, DAMMIT?! Pseudonyms are a slippery slope, but where it used to be pretty rare, we ALL have handles these days. I still feel weird calling my old friend Roger Prindle, who I've never met face to face, anything other than "Tragedy" when we chat on skype or vent.
I can't even be upset at them from a customer standpoint, because how much do I pay them per year? Nothing.
Zzzz. Well played, Google.
Friday, June 22, 2012
So... ixobelle@gmail.com is shut down, I guess
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6 comments:
There has to be multiple ways of proving its yous.
IP logs? Where the account was accessed?
Emails sent to that email from log in services that are yours.
If you have an Iphone and used email from that account on it there should be a log of your phone number ( i think)
Like you i have a net ID that I have had for 15 years, and even though its made me traceable, and googlable, and linked
don't give up.
it's not necessarily that I couldn't prove it to be mine, it's that they don't even offer a route to follow to do so.
Gmail is so ubiquitous that they don't want to support claims like these, but I can't say I really blame them, I guess...
omg you are alive. how is the family
There is a way to do it, supposedly. But it's automated and requires obscure details from the account.
Lately Google sucks.
The people at google are messing around with all parts of the internet. The problem it seems is that they are not testing there changes enough and all kinds off things are screwing up.
You are a customer. Someone pays them because we use their services... a lot.
Who remembers altavista or metacrawler? Do you remember searching for same thing in at least three four search engines? Who uses anything else but google for searches? Who knows wolfram alpha exists?
Thanks to us they get paid. There, you are a customer. And all you demand is an easy way like a secondary password or link to another email to open your account.Nice to hear from you again.Any comments on Diablo?
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