Ask HN: Gmail account security
I had this in ~2014 at an event. It literally would not let me log in no matter what.<p>This did reinforce that running my own email server was a good idea. Like, what are you going to do if it actually is important? Call google support? I&#x27;d be surprised if they have a helpdesk with humans nowadays, let alone to fix some free account at 1am in the morning. Or even if you get to talk to a human, what are they going to do? Disable a security measure because a kind voice asks them to?<p>Google thought my IP address was in Russia (I was in Germany) and I guess that makes it suspicious? (Feels a bit odd that entire countries are basically banned. Not as if criminals can&#x27;t use a VPS or VPN, it&#x27;s security theater and seems insulting to everyone living there: they&#x27;re all considered guilty until proven innocent.) I think I later checked and saw that there were no other active login sessions, so it knew that I could not possibly have done as it suggested. (Or maybe that was another instance of this problem, not sure anymore after 5+ years. I never forgot the lesson though...) The reason for logging in wasn&#x27;t time-sensitive so I let it go for the four days of the event.<p>A related problem is that I have to clean up my inbox after logging into various services. Twitter was one of the first and I apparently got annoyed enough that I stopped using it subconsciously (I only later noticed that I had stopped checking Twitter and figured that the annoyance factor must be the reason). Like yeah you don&#x27;t recognize my device, I don&#x27;t want your &quot;tweet&quot; buttons across the web to track me so of course this appears as a new login device. What would be more suspicious is a login from a known device to this account, if the machine learning functions correctly...