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Comment by Ajay-p | Hacker News Reader

One of my great fears in life is getting locked out of a Google or Meta account. I have resolved in myself that should that occur the account is forever lost because there is no way to get support. The best that one can hope for is that a media publication takes up their plight and writes about it, or they know someone who is employed by one of those corporations. Even when customers pay for a product, Meta and Google customer service is horrible.

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I had similar concerns so I at least moved my email to Fastmail and then set up a google account tied to it instead of Gmail. When you create the google account, you can just choose to use an existing email address (see https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/27441?hl=en#exist...).

Also, with fastmail if you use your own domain you can have any email address automatically forwarded to the same box. So, if your gmail account for "me@mydomain.com" gets shut down you can start a new one with "myself@mydomain.com" and you will still have access to all your customer service emails and info that may have been sent in the past. Any other provider should do, but I have liked fastmail a lot.

SSO + Gmail at the same provider = risk of permanent loss of access.

Actually you CAN get real human SLA tech support from google. If you pay $20/yr for https://one.google.com storage you also get paid support for google account snafus. No joke.

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