Step zero. Never disclose your email address to anyone.
This is very easy and straightforward. I operate 6 Gmail accounts, and three are "alts" where I've basically never given the address out to anyone at all, and they receive zero spam, zero UCE, zero marketing emails.
Of course, on my "main" I've disclosed the address to many entities and I use it for sign-in and shipping and many things. And yes, I do receive spam and scam emails there, but wcyd?
I did a “reset” a few years ago where I moved to a fresh gmail address, forwarded my old one, and updated all my accounts to use Apple’s Hide My Email service, unique per sender.
After a few years of updating addresses that I’d missed whenever something showed up that was forwarded from my old gmail account, I shut down my old account.
No more spam, whenever I start receiving spam to a Hide My Email address, I deactivate it.
I recently had a "role" Google account terminated because I was (paraphrasing) "violating Google policies" by having multiple accounts. I didn't know they were sticklers about that.
(I don't much care because the account was just used for interacting with somebody else's Google-hosted junk but, if I had been using it for something serious, I have probably been frustrated.)
There is no way, no possible way that Google prohibits the use of multiple accounts. They do not. They cannot. I just asked Gemini and I checked the actual TOS. It does not, in any way, prohibit these uses.
In fact, this is plainly evident by the way they give you tools to operate them in a systematic way. You can add multiple accounts to a single Android "user". You can add them to a single Google Chromebook account under one signed-in account. You can add multiple accounts separately to the same Chromebook.
You can add multiple accounts with the same names, the same birthdates, and the same Driver License. I've validated at least two YouTube channels by showing exactly the same ID.
Google did not terminate your account for the reason you state. You are not telling us all the background information.
Google may indeed terminate multiple accounts for the same person because of TOS violations. They will definitely link and associate your accounts, so making an "alt account" for misbehavior is not safe. If my "alt account" is compromised or violates TOS, then I can expect they will discipline all 6 equally, because they're all linked.
But operating multiple accounts is very explicitly supported by Google, and by Microsoft as well, I will say. I don't know about Apple. Facebook definitely prohibited this in the past, although you can maintain multiple "profiles" and "pages" that have unique settings and personalities.
Apparently my account "violated TOS" (though I don't see how). The other account was used to interact with a Google Workspace in 2016, and hasn't been used since. I don't particularly care to waste mental energy trying to figure out the methodology behind Google's decision here.
This happening seemed kinda sketchy to me (because I've heard of people having several Google accounts) but, like I said, I didn't really care too much.
Anyway, here's how it went down:
In 2016 I was working w/ a Customer who was using some Google product (I believe Workspace) and I have to have a Google account to interact w/ it. Because I didn't care for them to see my "personal" Google account I make this one-off account.
This account is a Google account w/o Gmail (i.e. the username is not "@gmail.com"). That may be a factor.
Over the years I'd receive notifications that Google was going to delete the account for inactivity. I'd logon again to keep it active.
On 2026-01-12 I got a notification that my old "role" Google account was going to be deleted for being inactive for two years. I decided I wanted to keep it so I attempted to logon. The password in my vault didn't work. I found that perplexing, so I did a "Forgot password" workflow. As part of that I was offered an SMS option. I used the telephone number I use for my main Google account. For sure they "know" I'm the same operator of both accounts.
I don't believe somebody guessed the password on this account and was using it because (a) I was notified it was inactive, and (b) the password was a random 16 character alphanumeric string used only for this account. Something was clearly sketchy about the password being "wrong", though.
I completed the "Forgot password" workflow on the "role" account and got access. I decided to enable TOTP and my "real" Gmail account as the recovery contact. Everything seemed fine.
On 2026-01-13 I received a message as-follows:
> From: Google <no-reply@accounts.google.com>
> To: MyUsername@NotGmail.example.com
> Subject: Your Google Account has been disabled
> It looks like this account was created or used with multiple other accounts to violate Google's policies. The account might have been created by a computer program or bot.
> If you think your account was disabled by mistake, submit an appeal as soon as possible.
> Disabled accounts are eventually deleted. You’ll need to submit an appeal soon to keep your emails, contacts, photos, and other data saved in your Google Account.
> If you live in the European Union (EU) or are an EU citizen, there may be additional resolution options available to you.
I feel like an easier solution to having six different email addresses is to use Gmail aliases - I've caught a few less-than-honest companies either selling my email address, or been breached without disclosing such, simply by using an alias along the lines of '+service_name'. If any alias starts to receive spam you can setup rules to automatically delete everything that comes in with that. You also get the added benefit of significantly easier and more accurate search.
I don't think y'all understand why I have separate Google accounts.
I use them for different purposes. They are "role accounts" for projects I am doing, such as geneaology and astronomy.
In order to use YouTube sanely, and store different stuff in Drive, I separate them into unique accounts. I use those accounts for specific things, and my YouTube subscriptions, playlists, etc. are tailored for each role, for example.
This is not about email at all. Obviously, I can access all those email accounts through the one app on my smartphone or the one PWA on my Chromebook. They are easily manageable but separate.
I also run 3 Outlook/Microsoft accounts, and for the same reason. (One of them is my academic account from community college, and the other two are personal.)
I don't need to give out email addresses for the "role accounts" except where I "Sign In With Google" to various services. So I don't really send/receive email from them at all, except where I'm sharing links or documents with myself (the best way to do this cross-account is still by using email, oftentimes.)
Well, spam is no big deal, and any scam that comes via email should not affect anyone who is educated and prepared for them.
Of course, with a well-known email address, you could run a higher risk of credential stuffing, and an account takeover by someone who hijacks your email account, and then pivots from there to taking other accounts.
But this seems to be a risk we all take: email addresses are meant to be shared, to be public, and to be well-known to anyone to correspond with us.
I will say that disclosing my email address to certain parties has had noticeable effects. For example, I used "MYADDRESS+Echovita@gmail.com" once, and only once. My godfather had passed away, and I ordered some flowers for his funeral. And I put that order through with that email address.
Well, Echovita themselves had a data breach shortly afterwards, and I was inundated with scam emails. Just all sorts of attackers and they were basically all using the same M.O. But they were readily identifiable because I had used that "+Echovita" to identify it uniquely. And they really haven't stopped coming in. It's been 5 years since that breach.
So yes, especially with untrusted parties, it may help to tag your email address. I don't worry about receiving spam anywhere. But like I said, since I've never ever disclosed the addresses of 2-3 of my "alt accounts" they simply never receive any mail at all, spam or no spam.
I did a wildcard acceptance for years, but it doesn’t scale as well something like Apple’s Hide My Email (or other comparable service) - with a catchall you have to then start keeping a blacklist of bad emails, and I started getting spam to generic addresses like info@customdomain.com or admin@customdomain.com - with @icloud.com addresses you can just delete an address and forget about it once it’s burned.
I have an absurd and overwrought system involving Gmail, and client-side rspamd and SpamSieve on my Mac. Gmail is (was?) overly aggressive flagging things as spam, so I have the client-side Bayesian filter check Gmail’s spam folder and rescue good email, so long as rspamd also says it’s not phishing. And then add sender to a Gmail whitelisting rule. All rescued email is flagged such that if I later manually move any of it back to junk, it stays there as spam and updates the corpus.
I now never get good email in the spam folder, and never get undetected spam in the inbox, and very occasionally get a spam erroneously rescued, but still visually flagged as iffy-but-maybe-ham.
If Gmail has been lax at filtering spam lately, I haven’t noticed, but perhaps the Bayesian filter has been picking up the slack.
I should consider this - I run my own domains, and for years I just forwarded it to gmail, but I had so many cases when mails were put into spam, even replies to emails I had sent in the middle of a long conversation between myself and 1 other person, that I went to just self-hosted IMAP. Then for years I couldn't reliably send to google or yahoo or MS; I added SPF a while ago which help, but recently buckled down and put in SRS and DMARC and DKIM (and rspamd while I was at it); now I get the mail I want, and can mostly send mail without it being rejected (still have to ask people to check spam, but anyways many people I have to tell them I'm emailing them anyways if its important). However I have a lot of non-spam "promotion" emails that I don't want to see. If I could train gmail to not block legit stuff reliably, that would be worth trying again (I would say except for the privacy implications, but since so much email involves gmail on one side or the other, they probably get most of it anyways).
I use Gmail since the beta (I got invite from a googler) and I don't remember when they began adding spam control but in my experience the GMail spam check works usually exceptionally well: I very rarely need to add a custom filter.
My email, over two decades+ (2004?), hasn't been in a many public leaks (only one on https://haveibeenpwned.com/ ) but obviously has made its way to various spammy actors but thankfully nearly everything is caught by GMail's spam filter.
If anything I'd say GMail's spam filter works too well: I get more legit emails in my spam folder than spam in my regular inbox. As in: one in a rare while vs about zero spam in my regular inbox.
Multiple accounts as others have said. The most powerful is to switch to a provider that permits custom domains and allows you to construct topic specific wildcard addresses on the fly. These can't be flagged as invalid or stripped like Google '+' suffixes and when compromised, you can filter them into oblivion and move on to something else. You also get the bonus of having the entire namespace to yourself and can select short addresses.
You don’t need an email service provider for that, plenty of DNS providers also offer email forwarding. I can recommend easyDNS, but various others are probably also good.
On a more serious note; chatgpt thinks that it may be caused by GPU driver issues - which would explain why your setup is having a harder time (my gpu is intel standard whatever...) so it suggests turning off hardware acceleration.
I'm a software engineer with expertise in distributed systems & edge computing with two years of professional full time work experience. Also co-founded a startup in ML & Healthcare and learned a lot from it.
I'm actually on a bridge call with Google Cloud, we're a large customer -- I just learned today that their status page is not automated, instead someone actually manually updates it!
That's the case with every status page. These pages are managed by business people not engineers, because their primary purpose is to show customers that the company is meeting contractually defied SLAs.
Maybe or maybe not, but someone with nothing better to do than monitor that page out of boredom might “get on the horn” with lots of people to complain if a green check mark turns to a red X.
They aren't automatically based on that page, but seeing a red status makes it too easy for customers to point to it and go "see you were down, give us a refund".
The best way to consistently having good "time to response" metrics, is to be the one deciding when an incident "actually" started happening, if at all :)
Heathrow's power outage is much worse than Atlanta's, this is really bad. Allow me to make my point:
1. UK’s has one major airport to get out of the country—Heathrow. Gatwick and that lot don’t carry the same weight. When Heathrow goes down, you’re proper stuck. Atlanta has DC, Miami right there.
2. UK allows transit visas, so half the people transiting can’t even step out the terminal, what do they do when the airport is closed?
The US doesn’t allow that, everyone clears customs/passport control, so no ‘no man’s land’ limbo for stranded passengers.
3. Heathrow's outage is going to take 24 hours as of right now. That's twice Atlanta
Both Gatwick [0] and Stansted are busier than either Washington airport [1], and if you're considering Miami as an alternative to Atlanta then why not similarly ridiculous options like Paris, Amsterdam, Dublin for passengers stuck in Heathrow?
Miami and DC aren't even close to the nearest major airport cities to Atlanta. Charlotte and Orlando are many hours closer and busier [1] in terms of commercial passengers (though still not as convenient as the UK's comparable airports).
Only about a quarter of Heathrow passengers are transiting [2] and a significant portion of those are citizens of the US, EU, UK and other countries who don't need a visa. Maybe 10% of passengers are stuck in limbo, not half of them.
Hi dang, did you extend their comments' "editability" or is it already a feature I have been missing all along? I mean ability to edit/delete after a certain time (I guess it's a few hours right now?).
Ye, I've been travelling on it since the first week it opened. But if you were redirected and had to fend for yourself you would need to book ahead on a tunnel or boat, hire a car to drive from France to Coquelles - find somewhere to drop the car, hire another car in the UK. All assuming you land in Paris in the morning early enough to do all this.
Yes, all of which could be done in hours less time than it would take to get from Atlanta to any comparable airport.
Consider the amount of train/ferry transit between London and Paris. That doesn't exist in the US. Rental car companies don't keep that much extra stock on hand, and really do not love renting cars for inter-state one-way journeys.
I categorically reject that getting from Atlanta to London with ATL nonoperational would be either faster or easier than getting from London to Atlanta with LHR nonoperational.
That I use regularly to actually drive from no-too-far from LHR to Paris and back. It's a thing I actually do.
And I can tell you, it might be theoretically in Google Maps land to do the journey in 6 hours, but IRL in this scenario it won't happen. Actual empirical evidence.
In theory yes, but we were specifically talking about driving. And whilst 6 hours CDG to LHR is possible in theory (and I've done it a number of times), it does depend on a whole load of other factors that are not present compared to hiring a car at US airport 1 and driving to US airport 2.
Unless you're in the movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
I brought up driving to illustrate the incorrectness of the original claim, the person I replied to did not mention driving. The person you replied to is correct to bring up the EuroStar option.
By the way, the snide remarks you add to the end to each of your comments may be better suited for a place like Reddit or TruthSocial. The community standards guidelines for HN can be found at the bottom of the page.
I was replying to "It is a six hour drive from Heathrow to Paris."
I live close enough to LHR to notice the replacement of Boeing/Airbus with Cessna/Pipers from local airfields in the sky today. I also regularly drive to and/from Paris.
It is a six hour drive. But ONLY if you have your car ready, have booked a crossing ahead of time (otherwise you might want to slap another half day on those times), make no stops, you don't end up in a queue at UK customs (1 hour+ not infrequent occurrance). Don't happen to have your car sitting at CDG waiting for you? You'll have to hire one, but you'll be unlikely to be able to take that to the UK so you're then finding somewhere to drop that off and somehow cross as a foot passenger which you can't do on Le Shuttle...
Point being, cross-border travel throws up all of these hurdles which you simply don't have in the US example.
It's still "right there" overall, you can take a local flight that takes one hour.
Most importantly, you're in the same country whereas in the case of LHR closing the number of airports able to handle widebody long haulers...are essentially all in countries with different customs and visas.
The US has dozens of smaller commercial and even private airports, same for London honestly so this isn't the greatest arguement except it doesn't need to deal with customs.
At least Ireland and the UK are in one visa regime, outside of Schengen. And because there are plenty of flights between Ireland and Schengen countries, all commercial Irish airports should have passport control.
But Dublin airport has about 1/2 the gates of Heathrow...
1: It's clearly not been as disruptive as you're suggesting. Flights have been diverted to airports within a few hour's journey by bus or train, others have been cancelled, just like would happen with Atlanta.
2: I don't know if they've done it, but the UK can grant entry for a few days to affected passengers. This will be part of a contingency plan.
> 2. UK allows transit visas, so half the people transiting can’t even step out the terminal, what do they do when the airport is closed?
Airside to airside bus shuttle?
> The US doesn’t allow that, everyone clears customs/passport control, so no ‘no man’s land’ limbo for stranded passengers.
Anchorage International Airport, amongst few (less than a handful really) other US airports, have separate international section with sterilised transit.
It seemed to me like an open and shut case too, but no one at apple would listen. When you sign terms and conditions at dropoff, you basically sign away rights :/
