Posted by zenincognito 4 days ago
Why the fuck would Google care in which country I live? It's a personal decision, and no corporation should have any say in this. They certainly don't have to flag an account for that, especially not if the account has 2FA enabled. This is on Google, too.
Your comment is victim blaming.
30 day cool down period is a reasonable response, at scale.
Aren't cellular providers inherently tied to the country they're in?
How do you move to another country without changing cellular providers at the same time?
For cheaper rates than roaming, typically you install a secondary eSIM for the country you're traveling. 99% modern phones support dual SIM for this reason
Well, you have become the product here. That also happens by other "free" email providers too. I had this happen to me on inbox.lt; the guy demanded I use a smartphone to "prove" my identity. At that point I realised they want to connect this data to the account and sell it to others who are interested in that.
2. the response is glib and lacks any empathy
3. there's no suggestions of possible action or resolution path
4. it is all opinion and low value / low effort
So even if it's an "honest and accurate diagnosis" that you agree with, it's not helpful, valuable or even comforting. We can do better.
It's still repugnant to me, as compared to self-hosting, but I would never self-host for a greenfield SMB Customer today. The economics don't make sense and the talent pool of knowledgeable and reasonable sysadmins is dwindling by the day. (I wouldn't want to make a Customer so beholden to me if they were willing to pay for it.)
I miss being able to spin-up an on-prem email server on a box with reasonable hardware redundancy, some external USB disks to rotate for off-site backup, a UPS, a couple consumer-grade "business class" Internet connections, and a contracted "backup MX" to catch email in the event of an outage. It was a good enough for a lot of small SMBs who had a physical office, and was cheap.
The difference is that everyone's account kept working during that time so business kept on as usual, just the admins couldn't change anything.
The sad thing is I don't think anyone did anything unusual and it was some kind of bug of Microsoft's end.
Moving the MX for the domain and limping along from backups is my worst-case contingency but given that there's no place other than M365 to restore the backups to it isn't a very good strategy.