Talking to a human doesn't necessarily make anything any easier.
Lots of large companies have a bunch of customer support agents who are easy to get in touch with, but entirely powerless to solve these sorts of problems: "Computer says no". They are just, to be blunt, executing flowcharts, and have no scope to escalate beyond that.
The only reliable ways to get decent customer support are, in my experience:
- The CEO is a friend of yours
- Your account is so large that a significant chunk of the company depends on you for their income
- You have an ironclad support contract
- Regulatory requirements enforce a level of customer service
Unfortunately, none of those are likely to apply to an average person looking for an email provider, and running one is usually impractical due to these large companies blocking small hosts. Next best thing is taking regular backups and having your own domain with a low TTL MX record.
Right. Say you forget your password. Say you get to a customer support agent and they tell you how to get a password reset sent to your alternate email or phone number.
"Um, I don't have an alternate email and my phone number changed when I moved countries last year."
They'll probably (and correctly) maybe make sympathetic noises but basically say too bad. Presumably this wouldn't happen with a (non-trivial) company where there's some level of known identity. But for an individual there would presumably need to be a last-resort process that required real-world identity verification in some form.
Lots of large companies have a bunch of customer support agents who are easy to get in touch with, but entirely powerless to solve these sorts of problems: "Computer says no". They are just, to be blunt, executing flowcharts, and have no scope to escalate beyond that.
The only reliable ways to get decent customer support are, in my experience:
- The CEO is a friend of yours
- Your account is so large that a significant chunk of the company depends on you for their income
- You have an ironclad support contract
- Regulatory requirements enforce a level of customer service
Unfortunately, none of those are likely to apply to an average person looking for an email provider, and running one is usually impractical due to these large companies blocking small hosts. Next best thing is taking regular backups and having your own domain with a low TTL MX record.