… so make sure to write down or remember the login info?
It’s really not that hard.
Who remembers their phone number from 20 years ago?
This.
Google requires more than that now; they now also require 2FA via a smartphone.
I have had the same phone number since I first got a cell phone in the 1990s. Why would my number change?
Until maybe 15 years ago (edit: around 2003-2004, actually), cell numbers weren’t portable across area codes, nor across carriers. If you moved from one state to another, and/or had to change carriers, you also had to change cell numbers.
I moved from L.A. in 2003. I’ve changed carriers since I’ve been here because AT&T sucked. Then I got Virgin, which changed to Boost. Then I got Xfinity because I could actually use my phone where I live.
I mean, use another service then, but I’ve never had an issue in the twenty years I’ve had a Gmail account. Millions upon millions of people use a Google login without a problem. It works fine.
Like what?
I’ve always had problems with this account. There’s a hotmail account too.
I did this somewhere in the distant past. I believe I already had a Google account years ago. And then my cell phone provider needed me to have a gmail address so I created one just for that purpose.
Now my Google account has 2 different emails attached and You Tube thinks I am a “brand” account which I don’t even fully understand. But being a brand account does create some unexpected difficulties.
It’s an unholy mess that I just try to ignore when possible.
However I do have my Walmart account hooked to my gmail address (long, confusing story).
And then all of a sudden today my Google Maps erased all of my years of Timeline despite the fact that i had set everything up to avoid such a disaster. Almost 10 years of Timeline gone.
There are some days when I just want to detach from all of it.
Take a look at Proton.
That said, I have several Gmail addresses. Phone isn’t the only way back in if there’s a problem.
Yeah, I tried to set up an account (gmail?) years ago when my keyboard had a sticky key. It’s still out there somewhere. And it’s attached to my YouTube account, so that’s unusable.
In any case, I have to work in the morning, so I’m out for the night.
This site indicates that, while they rate Gmail and Microsoft Outlook as the best free email services, Proton (and Zoho) are also well-rated.
I don’t think you have an existing Gmail account. What is your @gmail.com email address?
Also, did you go to gmail.com? The login screen does not look like the one you shared in the OP. What is the web address that got you to that landing page?
Not always, that only happens if it thinks you’re trying to log in “from a new device”, but it occasionally has a fit and thinks you are even when it’s the same old device you’ve been using for years, so yes, you need to be able to handle that. Under some circumstances you’ll get the message on your phone that “someone is trying to log in to your xxx account” and you have to tap “Yes” if it’s you.
I sympathize with the OP because Google/Gmail really is ridiculously anal about security. For example, I recently changed a bunch of passwords including on two Gmail accounts, and at some point I think I decided I didn’t like one of the passwords and changed it again. When I tried to log in, I got the message “the password was changed less than one hour ago”. Yes, I know, I changed it, why are you telling me this in red letters and not allowing me to log in?
It turns out that what the message really means is “incorrect password”. Apparently in the confusion of multiple password changes, I had failed to record the last change. So I clicked on the “recover account” option which is supposed to reset things and send a message to a recovery email account. But not so fast! First it asked, “What was the last password you remember using?”. If I had not known that, I think the account may have been irrecoverably stuck.
My advice to the OP is go ahead and use Gmail – millions of people do – but enable all the recovery options that are available, one of which should be a smartphone, and carefully record your password(s), preferably using a simple password manager, and one of which should be some non-Gmail account. If you do all that you should be fine, although the occasional security notifications and 2FA demands will be mildly annoying.
I have at least four different Google accounts. I’ve never had a problem with that. Three of them send mail to this phone. (One was kind of a throwaway account that i haven’t used in years, and probably never will again. But it seems mail to my laptop.)
This is really the crux of any service. Google are not the best at eliciting trust. But the hoops they make you go through for security are arguably a much better situation that the converse.
Eventually the desire for a free email that does it all is not going to happen. If you are not paying for the service, there is not exactly much incentive for the service to deliver the level of long term trustworthiness you might want. And email is a service that is getting squeezed at the moment as providers are trying to get shot of doing it. Which isn’t good.
You really do want two factor authentication on your email service.
The problem with email is that along with your phone number, these are the two most critical authenticating technologies that are tied to you. Recovery email addresses for password resets on just about every service with an internet presence service you use are a huge attack surface. If you lose control of your email account to a bad actor, you an be undone in very short order. 2FA provides minimally a useful speed hump, and probably prevents most attacks. Phone number is the same. But in some respects less secure. The pair is better.
I have a Google mail account via a company I used to work for that uses paid for Google services. It is still active and they occasionally send me email asking about stuff. It will die if the company ceases operation. My main email is an address for a service that came with my internet service - which was from a very good reputable service provider founded by an old mate. Sadly it has long since been adsorbed into a big faceless conglomerate company that recently decided to exit the email game altogether. I got to port the address to a commercial email provider. Which wasn’t great, but at least I have a supported service where there is an incentive on the part of the provider to maintain service. But for the very long term - decades hence? I worry. I have had email since the mid 80’s. It has grown in extent and importance dramatically in that time. But not in a controlled manner. Which is why trust in any provider is to some extent misplaced.
Apple provide an email account with the iCloud service, which most Apple users will use to some extent, even it is fairly limited. They don’t support aliasing it to a different domain. However they are not really in the game of providing an all in email service either. But I tend to trust them more than Google.
In short, your email is important. More so than many realise. It is important to be clear about what you want and what the limitations you are prepared to accept are, and whether it is worth your while paying for the service. Personally, I would never tie something so critical to a free service. But plenty do. YMMV.
I don’t see why not. Gmail is extremely reliable, and you can mitigate any dependency by using your own custom domain name and redirecting to Gmail. If you decide you no longer like Gmail, it’s then trivially easy to switch to a different provider. But I don’t see much difference between paid-for business Gmail and free Gmail. They use the same infrastructure.
I agree about that. But getting your own domain name means you are now paying for a service. Which is what the OP seems to want to avoid. And is way past what most people are are interesting in doing. Eventually it is the name resolution that you most care about.
Goodness, this seems ill-tempered.
There is no online service you can sign up for, not use for 10 or 15 years, and expect the sign-on system to be just like you left it. They are going to change things while you are gone. And if you had been using it all along, you would have gotten ample notification of those changes as they happened.
Like nearly everyone on Earth, I have a Google account. Which includes GMail. I don’t use my GMail address except as an emergency backup or for rare occasions where I really need two distinct addresses. About once every 6 months I clean out the inbox and look for any surprises.
But my browser & my Android are logged into my Google account pretty much 24/7/365. And every month or so a pop-up appears and says
Are you sure that [phone number] is still your valid phone number? Are you sure that [my other non-gmail email] is your valid account recovery email? If not, click here to update them.
It would take years, if not decades, of active neglect for me to get locked out of my Google account. The OP’s issue of “not trusting Google” seems nonsensical. It’s definitely counterproductive.
Switching gears …
In one sense, Google accounts are disposable. If you somehow manage to lock yourself out of one forever, just create a new one. if you lose access to one that is long dormant, that raises the question of why you want that account back so badly versus just creating a new one.
An issue I do see that applies to all of us, not just the OP, is what I’ll call “the digital basement”. Most of us have an IRL basement, attic, shed, etc., full of old unused stuff and memorabilia. On a daily basis we don’t access it, but we know it’s there and it being there gives us comfort.
Once in a great while we want to look at or use a bit of that stuff, so we go hunting for it. If it’s lost or destroyed (water, mice, rot, etc.), that’s a sad thing. We’re content enough to store the stuff less than perfectly archivally, and we accept the possibility of loss of a bit of it even as we assume everything will always be available in pristine condition.
We’re each developing a similar digital basement on local hard drives, backup tapes, etc. and a similar online basement at various web-based or cloud-based services. Which basements we’d like to assume are perpetual. They’re not. e.g. Google isn’t going to lose your stuff. But they may lock you out of it if you try hard enough to lose your keys. So don’t do that.
Last point:
AIUI it is against the law to access any online account belonging to a dead person. Lots of people do it, but it’s a violation of one of the US’s anti-hacking laws.
I can say it’s 100% illegal to access the online financial logins of a dead person. If the bank or broker or whatever figures out it’s you, that will lock those logins and you will find all future IRL interactions with that institution will start from the assumption that you are a criminal trying to steal the decedent’s money. My late wife was an attorney in that area and it goes very badly for the innocent heirs who thought they were doing the right thing my logging onto dead granny’s bank account to see which bills needed paying.
But you’re not having trouble logging into your account. You’re having trouble logging in to someone else’s account. That’s by design. Make your own. You won’t have any problems and I promise they won’t arbitrarily decide to not give you access.
Other options are outlook.com; yahoo.com; hotmail.com; excite.com. Gmail and Outlook are your best options IMO.