Comment by wcoenen
5 years ago
There is a paid option: for $6/month you can use gmail with your own domain name. It's targeted at businesses but you can use it as an individual.
https://workspace.google.com/pricing.html
It includes support, but I'm not sure if that helps in cases where google thinks you have abused the service. I just use it because I like having my own domain, and so that I don't lose access to my email if google locks me out. The idea is that I can update my domain's MTX records and use another email service.
Support does not include if your account gets suspended or if you lose access.
We had a paid Google App account. One of our workers would only login from their computer. It died, and she tried to login from the new computer. It gave a unrecognized machine error, and we had to hire someone to resuscitate the old computer for her.
I know of a company that had the entire companies' accounts suspended without warning because one user did something that violated their terms, but they could not figure out what. The company lost three months of revenue from it and I am not sure if it caused bankruptcy. No help at all from G.
About a year ago, I started migrating to a vanity domain, currently hosted at Google, for this reason. If I get locked out of Google, I lose my history, but at least I can move to another provider and avoid being locked out of my life for the indefinite future.
Friendly reminder to anybody reading this with a Google account: it's not a perfect solution, but head over to Google Takeout and grab a dump of your account data while you're thinking of it. I did one last year, and at the same time reconfigured my phone camera roll to back up somewhere outside the Google ecosystem, so now all I'm missing is an up to date email mirror.
Meta: my comment above is being downvoted significantly. I'm not sure what I did to offend. There was a remark about the need for a paid option, and I pointed out that it already exists. I have no agenda here and was just sharing what I know.
I suspect it might be because the OP is about getting your account locked out, and several commenters have said that even paid accounts lose access to human support when they're locked out, so it's not actually a solution.