When Google locks you out
I came home after a long day of activities to find myself locked out of my Google account. I was told that there was suspicious activity and it had decided to lock me out.
The verification code to set everything going is via a text message to your phone. After that you enter a completely new password.
Now comes the fun. You have to regenerate codes for all your 2-step authentication authenticated applications. This is a huge pain for me – iPhone, Galaxy S3, Nexus 7, BlackBerry, Mail, Adium, etc. The list is really long.
Overall this seems counterintuitive. I checked my account history. I did get connected via one odd IP today, but beyond that, nothing. It was me, my mail client connected from that IP.
Saw a bounce. Seems that I forwarded a message from google groups, it got rejected, and automatically it triggered that I might be a spammer. Seems like a bug more than anything.
Overall, I spent about 45 minutes just sorting out this problem. There has got to be a better way considering how important the Google account is to us these days. I didn’t notice a phone number either so if I needed to call someone, I’d probably be quite out of luck.
