Comment by throwaway150
10 hours ago
It's gone. No human will ever respond to you. That's how these companies operate. From here, you realistically have two options.
1. Forget the account and move on. You could create a new one, but nobody can tell how long it would take before that gets suspended as well.
2. If the suspension has a tangible negative impact on your profession, hire a lawyer and get proper legal advice.
Most important of all, let this be a lesson for you and your colleagues. It is a terrible idea to let any critical part of your life depend on unregulated industries that can wipe out someone's livelihood at the whim of machine learning systems. Learn this lesson and pass it on to everyone you know.
As an individual, you are nobody to Google and you have no leverage. It is reckless to build your livelihood or profession around their platforms. If you were a company, your team could speak to an account manager and negotiate. As an individual, your only real leverage is legal action.
Stories like this appear every month. I don't know how many more it will take before it becomes best practice not to depend on these utterly abominable rackets for anything critical.
> let this be a lesson for you and your colleagues.
Nah, big tech infiltrates everything, it’s 100% their fault. Why did everyone switch to webmail? Why did we gravitate to web apps? Big tech persuaded us all to do it.
With big promises comes great responsibility, and the stuff in the fine print doesn’t count. It’s not ethical to invite dependency and randomly kneecap people; it shouldn’t be legal either.
100% agree with you. The big techs are definitely 100% at fault. But you know, fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice...
I mean, we get these stories every month. Yes, 100% it is not ethical to randomly kneecap people. But let's be honest. Nobody is working on making these big tech companies accountable for the potentially devastating, algorithm-driven decisions they take. How many more times do they have to fool us before we all realize that it's time to move away from them?
All I ask from you, myself and all the tech folks here is to learn from these lessons and pass them on to everyone around you. With how things are today, it is reckless to depend on these big tech cloud services for your livelihood and profession. If you're working for a company where the company has leverage, all good. But as an individual, you should stay away from these big tech companies, because they can screw up your life any day, without warning and without recourse.
Mars persuaded me to buy their chocolate. I couldn't help myself.
With email in particular, it's not like chocolate. If you self-host email, or use any other cloud host besides Microsoft or Google, then Microsoft and Google will randomly fail to deliver emails you send to their users, even though you have SPF, DKIM, DMARC, etc. set up exactly right.
Seriously #2 is your only recourse. Download the terms of service / your service contract , highlight their violations and send them a certified letter about breach of contract and that you intend legal recourse.