Way too risky to use Google services like this tied to your primary account. There’s too much risk of cross damage. Imagine losing access to your Gmail because some Gemini request flags you as an undesirable. The digital death sentence of losing access to your email with a company that notoriously has no way for the average human to contact a human is not worth the risk.
Use a custom domain and don't use google for email.
And if you do use your gmail address just forward it and start to transition to something else. With time everything of importance has been transferred.
How do you even pull away from a Gmail address? I'm nearly twenty years into that service. Getting banned would be absolutely devastating...
Use your own domain to sign up for a paid email service, provided by a company that focuses on email. I use Fastmail, but there are many other options.
Set up forwarding in Gmail to your new address.
Then, whenever you log in to a website or app with your Gmail, take a moment to change it to your new address. In a few weeks, most of your important accounts will be covered. In a few months, almost everything you still actively use will be done.
I did this ~5 years ago and the only thing that still arrives at my Gmail is spam.
I did this but don't forward. Instead, every new email in Gmail I got would prompt me to go update that service's contact info for me.
It probably doesn't matter, but it made me feel a little better because that way Google wouldn't have direct info on to which email/domain I transfered (ignoring other Gmail contacts that start emailing me at my new address(es) ).
Same here but ~8 years.
You can mitigate/speed the process using your password manager too.
I still use a filter in my email so that if something comes in under my Gmail, it gets a special tag that I can filter on and treat those as a todo list. Rarely happens beyond the occasional Google Meet connection.
For quite some time (approx 8 years) I've used an email forwarding (Blur, but any works) to avoid spam.
This looks like perfect case for change of email, since lot of these accounts can be moved out from Gmail by changing the address that email is forwarded too.
Looks like all this hassle with generating a new email for each service pays for the second time (by ease of changing the main mail), in addition to spam and privacy protection.
Solid advice, but I want to double, watch out for things you only log into once a year.
Making a new local account on your machine is a good first step.
^this is the way.
You can buy a domain name for like $10 per year; I recommend getting it from porkbun.com.
Cloudflare.com is good too, EXCEPT if you buy your domain from them, you'll be required to use their nameservers until and unless you transfer your domain elsewhere (which you won't be able to do for a while). Though to be fair, their free DNS is good and lots of people use it anyway. It makes email setup slightly more complicated, but it's still doable.
Spaceship.com also has a pretty good reputation, but I think their customer service isn't as good, they're quite new, and they're owned by Namecheap (a bigger domain registrar with a much worse reputation).
Whatever you do, DO NOT buy from GoDaddy. Do not even search for the domain you're considering on GoDaddy. Literally any option is better than GoDaddy.
By far the most reliable TLD options are .com, .net, and .org. These will look relatively trustworthy for email, and the price stays very very stable from year to year. If you don't want to think about it, just get one of these. You can even still find single dictionary word domains for .org or .net relatively easily.
Do not buy any domain marked "premium". This means the owner of the TLD can change the price at renewal as dramatically as they want, for any reason (e.g. if you have a website hosted at that domain that becomes popular). Your $20 per year domain might suddenly become a $300 or $3000 per year domain for no reason but greed, and you wouldn't be able to do anything about it.
Non-premium nTLD's (.club, .horse, .rocks, .theater, etc) can increase quite dramatically in price, BUT the price is required to be set the same for all domains using that nTLD, so they can't target any individual person for having a successful website or whatever. Also, you can pre-buy up to 10 years, which locks in your price for those 10 years. I'd still not recommend them for a primary email, but it's better than buying a "premium" domain. Just be aware that the yearly price might unexpectedly increase in the future.
Some country code TLD's are also good, but for email, probably stay away from the ones that spammers like to use.
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Anyway, what I actually originally meant to comment about is: if you set up forwarding from gmail and don't check that account regularly anymore, I recommend setting up a gmail filter rule that forwards all your gmail spam to you (their regular forwarding setting leaves it out and just sends it to the gmail spam folder). It's a little annoying to have to re-flag some of the spam as spam in your new email, but gmail has a habit of marking non-spam as spam for me, and if you're not regularly checking that spam folder you can easily miss important email.
Porkbun have started demanding ID verification for registrations, which depending how you feel about current events might make you reconsider having them on your list
Register your own domain, use a third-party provider to handle actual sending and receiving (I use proton, which makes the setup very easy), forward your Gmail to your personal domain address and as renewals and reminders come in switch your email on services to your personal domain.
After a year or two losing Gmail becomes an inconvenience; after a few more years it is nothing. As everything is now on your own domain name you can switch providers without affecting anything.
That's what I did about 5 years ago and my only regret is not doing it earlier.
I just sold a domain I had for 25 years and used for everything including API endpoints, email, authentication, etc. It took a couple weeks to transition myself and my family/friends.
Pretty sure just moving emails would have take a lot less effort. I had the advantage of keeping the domain until I was ready to move, now imagine Google just turned it off one day and what your workload would be. I shudder to think about having to deal with that.
I moved away from a gmail address that was that old, dating back to the invitation-only days. It had become more spam than not, mostly other people who share my initials not knowing their own email addresses. But the possible devastation you mention was more worrying. It had become too much of a risk for my banking and identity generally to not own my email address.
I got a custom domain. I still host it on google, because I know how impossible it is for small companies to have a reasonable program to deal with insider threats. Because of that, I think only one of the giant companies can realistically provide secure email. And the google app suite is great. Now that I pay for google workspace, there's support and appeals available, and if they ban me anyway, I still control the domain and can regain access to everything.
I have not been able to delete the old address, even after 3 years. There are some things like Google Fi that can only use a non-workplace google account. Very, very rarely, I still get an email that matters on it. But I got to the point where I could stop checking it in about 2 months, and now I look at it about once a week quickly, more out of habit than anything else.
The switch was annoying, but not "hard". It was worth it.
Just start changing addresses. Forward the rest. It takes about a year. Changing your name is way harder and tons of folks do that all the time.
gmail uses IMAP.
make another mailbox (another provider - migadu, fastmail, proton, whoever) that has IMAP as well. (selfhosting.. is PITA. only if u really need it).
install some standalone mail-client - thunderbird, clawsmail, applemail, or k9 , aqua on android, whatever. Attach both mailboxes into that. Find out how to copy an e-mail from one folder into another.
Folder by folder, select all mails, copy from one mailbox into the other. Will take time.
(Beware, some clients (apple) will fuckup the mail-date, anything older than 5 years becomes 5 years old. or it shows like that. YMMV.)
i have made this multiple times, for 20+ years of mails...
Get your own domain so you can easily change providers in the future. Start with your password manager and change the address on all the accounts you have in there.
After a few years you'll notice you stop bothering to check your Gmail and you can delete it to close the address.
If you need motivation, skim the /r/GMail subreddit and see how many people are getting locked out daily.
Do you have a recommendation for a major email provider as a fallback if you have to pick one?
I vaguely recall encountering a service that only accepted addresses from a whitelist of big providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc.), even @icloud did not qualify.
That's a service that doesn't want your business. If you care, message them about it
I've never once run into a service with such a restriction, but I can imagine someone being that short-sighted. I have seen services that only support "log in with Google or Facebook", which is comparably terrible.
Discogs will not let me login with my own domain (of 30 years) and required one of the big providers. It kept complaining about "risky domain". But that is the only incident I can think of.
Discogs
Who? Never heard of them, and it sounds like there's a good reason for that.
I've run into services that will flag specific tlds as invalid.
It will never be easier than right now. Every day you stay, you dig their moat around you even deeper
I just went through all accounts in my password manager, logged in and changed my email. It takes a little while but not that much.
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Sign up at fastmail.com, set up forwarding, change your "reply-to" address. A year later, you'll have nothing arriving in gmail except marketing cruft.
took about 30 minutes to switch to proton mail
This service is basically a nightmare to export/move away from. 30 minutes to switch to, maybe 30 hours to switch away from.
Same. I still have an old Gmail address that receives forgotten but still considered important emails from various services.
What's the playbook for migrating away in this situation?
Companies need to allow you update your personal information including your email. It may need tickets to support but it's doable.
Just have to get started and suffer for a while and make it a practice to switch emails when you log into places.
I switched to fastmail with my own domain.
I went with SimpleLogin.
Although I am increasingly concerned with its longevity since there's a non-zero risk that Proton might shut down SimpleLogin since Proton Pass has its own alias feature.
There was a time back when we could get generic LoginWIth OAUTH butons along with the social media roster , allowing one to use whichever provider they wanted.
Current state of OIDC should be pretty much standard across most providers - it put it that devs need too make the push to support alt login providers for preventing vendor lockin in identity like were currently barreling towards in hardware/software.
This wasn't due to some random Gemini request. Users were using sketchy antigravity auth plugins to use their antigravity tokens on things like OpenClaw, clearly against ToS. It's great that Google is giving these users a second chance.
Yes, our masters once again embarrass us unworthy peons with their endless grace, generosity and forebearance. How lucky we are to entrust our data and our lives to them!
Anyone can buy the tokens via the API and do whatever they want with them.
Its not evil of Google to say "Here is an allotment of steeply discounted tokens, but you can only use them with our services."
It is evil to block your email and hold your photos hostage over it though :)
They only blocked access to Antigravity and GeminiCLI for the offense.
Didn’t they only block Antigravity though, leaving other services available?
I would question the judgment of anyone who thought they would maintain "don't be evil" beyond IPO.
https://youtu.be/ntICHMV-WMA?t=40
"Google Shuts Down Gmail For Two Hours To Show Its Immense Power"
If a 3rd party product advertises compatibility with a Google service and you use it to login via a first party Google login page, doesn’t the responsibility fall somewhere between the offending product and Google itself? In practice it’s structured pretty much like a phishing attempt.
Notably some model providers explicitly allow that very flow, while others will ban you without notice.
If the "3rd party product" is you selfhosting FOSS, then that's you (OpenClaw users)
Why do you call it self-hosting? It appears to be installable app with a fancy homepage. At what point does the software being covered by an open license changes the responsibility model?
Okay but they were paying customers paying $$$ for the service. Banning your customers without prior warning is not right, however sketchy their behaviour might appear. Even if it's obvious to Google that there's a difference between a Gemini API key and an Antigravity API key, it's not necessarily obvious to others.
The correct and sane thing to do is to send them an email, with at most a 24 hour suspension. If they keep doing it despite being warned then by all means fire them.
The concern is not losing access to some new IDE for operating outside the terms of service. The concern is when you lose access to the IDE, you also lose access to your 20 year old Gmail account.
A general problem for Google products is that everything is mixed together.
But that's not what happened.
They were banning people and those people couldn’t even cancel their subscription. That’s a rookie mistake and you expect the same company to have a flawless ban system?
It’s be great if Google just revoked antigravity access if terms were violated. No need to disable the entire account.
> just revoked antigravity access
That's exactly what they did, plus Gemini CLI and Code Assist, which are the same product in different formats.
No Google account has been banned for this. People just keep spreading this lie because no one agrees that they have the right to steal the OAuth token.
"steal" is semantically incorrect here.
It's their OAuth token, it's not being stolen. It's just being copied from one place on their computer to another. This is no different than a competing browser importing your localStorage and cookies from Chrome on first launch.
No, the OAuth token is supposed to be used solely with the context of a first-party app only. Clearly, if you need to extract the key by reverse engineering or set up a proxy to spoof requests to a service, you're doing something shady.
> No, the OAuth token is supposed to be used solely with the context of a first-party app only.
The web doesn't work like that. The operators of google.com saying you must only use Chrome to load it is a ridiculous concept. It's not spoofing to use your own access credentials on your own computer to access your own account on an HTTP API.
>The web doesn't work like that. The operators of google.com saying you must only use Chrome to load it is a ridiculous concept.
I have no idea what you are talking about. Chrome? Are you sure you are replying to the right thread?
Only Antigravity and Gemini access was banned, not email or other google account stuff.
I’ll go further: there should be laws addressing account consolidation. Getting banned from an Apple or Google account is an incredibly wide blast radius. It would be like being banned from buying Unilever or Nestle food from your grocery store.
Email providers should be utilities and also legally require a warrant before disclosing any information whatsoever to the government.
Unfortunately the government is full of corrupt geriatrics who do not understand technology and are paid to continue not understanding technology as they sign bills prepared for them by ALEC.
>It's great that Google is giving these users a second chance.
I hope this is sarcasm. A permaban as the first action is never a good idea.
When's the last time you read the ToS of a service you signed up for?
Telling your users they can't use certain software to access your HTTP API is exactly the same as telling people they can't use certain browsers to load https://google.com.
"Hey Gemini, write a short blurb casting our capriciousness in a good light."
> Way too risky to use Google services like this tied to your primary account
As a hedge, you can google.com/takeout on a monthly cadence.
At least a few years ago when raspberry pi nodes were cheap, you could set up rClone to sync the `TAKEOUT` folder of your gdrive account locally and then encrypt it and shove it into backblaze. Then set up a monthly reminder to quickly request a takeout and make sure that you choose the "deliver to google drive" option.
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That's a big part of why I switched to paid email.
I'm the customer, not the product.
Here’s an idea: run your digital life away from a corporate shitbucket like Google. Don’t run your email there. Plenty of good other options.
It's not 100% clear to me, but supposedly it was just access to Antigravity that was shut off.
If people lost access to their whole accounts that would be a major crisis for Google users. But it doesn't seem that that was actually the case.
This doesn't make it super clear, but, the submission from a week ago when bans got handed out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47115805
yeah exactly have you ever tried to call Google support? it doesn't exist. the only way to contact Google is by posting something on news.ycombinator.com and then hoping that some person who works at that company actually responds to you and logs in somewhere and then changes your access.
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AFAIK it has clearly been a ban of Gemini and not of all people's Google accounts.
However many stories appeared where people tried to claim that their whole Google account was banned to gain traction.
Unless it is clear that a full Google account has been banned we should push back on any story that claims this.
Why? Google has been doing automated bans for ages, even before "AI".
By now they lost any trace of goodwill they ever had and are guilty until proven innocent.
> The digital death sentence of losing access to your email
I agree that the digital death sentence is really bad and doubly so seen that many are using single-sign on tied to their Google identity but...
> with a company that notoriously has no way for the average human to contact a human is not worth the risk
There's definitely phone support for paying Google Workspace users: don't tell me there's not, my wife got Google support on the phone more than once and they've been helpful.
And it's not a crazy expensive subscription either.
This remains a problem for the personal account though (arguably what "primary account" meant in GP)
Can that account be upgraded to Workspace just to get the support?