Gmail is starting to get on my nerves

[aimeeandbeatles]

They keep trying to demand a mobile phone number even though I can't afford one.

Their answer if you dont have one is "too bad, use a friend's phone."




This is starting to highly get on my nerves. I keep my account secure but apparently its not enough for them. Now they're starting to imply by their messages they might kick me out of my account if I don't give them my nonexistant mobile number.

It wouldnt be such a problem if you could use a landline and have them use a voice message instead of text, but apparently that's beyond their reasoning.




Does anyone have any idea what I should do about this, other than "get a mobile phone or find a friend who has one"?

 

[Zelig]

Switch to Outlook.com

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

How much space do you get from there?

 

[Zelig]

Unlimited, it's the replacement to hotmail.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Well I'll take a look at it.

 

[Maniacal]

The once every month or two I get that stupid "security" form when logging into gmail I just skip it. I highly doubt they will freeze your account if you don't provide one.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

It wouldn't bother me at all if GMail didn't insist on logging my account out every 2 weeks.

 

[Maniacal]

It does that to everyone I think. Not a big deal, helps you remember your password.

 

[Zelig]

It does that to everyone I think. Not a big deal, helps you remember your password.

Nah, it's kind of dependent on setup, I'm not really sure how it's determined.

My tablet logs me out regularly, but my work laptop logs me out never. (Well, not in the ~10 weeks I've had it.)

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Well I'm still half-thinking about switching to Outlook. My mother says we might be able to afford a cell phone service soon.

Yeah, I looked it up, GMail cookies expire after 2 weeks. Frustrating, really.

 

[Quintillus]

I find this minorly annoying as well, even though I have a cell phone. There's no need for all these sites to have my number, so other than banking sites, I've avoided it. Although the message I got today didn't imply anything about being locked out by Google - just reiterating the old danger that someone might log in and change the password, thus locking you out that way.

GMail cookies do expire after 2 weeks, but it ought to be possible to change the expiration date of the cookie. I've done that with YouTube cookies before in order to keep YouTube comments hidden more permanently. You ought to be able to do it this way with Opera:

1. Go to Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Cookies
2. Click Manage Cookies
3. Type in "mail.google.com" in the search bar in the upper-left
4. Find the cookie that says "mail GX" at the beginning.
5. Double-click it.
6. Change the expiration date.
7. OK out of the dialogs.

There probably are ways to do this with other browsers, too, but I'd have to look up how to do it with them. Internet readings indicate for Firefox, there's a cookie editor plug-in/add-on of some sort that does the same sort of thing Opera's built-in cookie editor does.

I've adjusted my login cookie to expire in 4 minutes, so I'll know soon if this works...

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

What happened?

 

[Mise]

They let you use a landline number here in the UK. But yeah there are plenty of alternatives that don't require you to hand over your phone number.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

I tried to put my landline in and it said it wasnt a valid mobile number.

 

[Disgustipated]

I usually put some made up number like 666-6666.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Well I tried a random number, 123-4567 or something along those lines, and it told me that it wasn't valid. So it didnt work.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

They keep trying to demand a mobile phone number even though I can't afford one.

Their answer if you dont have one is "too bad, use a friend's phone."




This is starting to highly get on my nerves. I keep my account secure but apparently its not enough for them. Now they're starting to imply by their messages they might kick me out of my account if I don't give them my nonexistant mobile number.

It wouldnt be such a problem if you could use a landline and have them use a voice message instead of text, but apparently that's beyond their reasoning.




Does anyone have any idea what I should do about this, other than "get a mobile phone or find a friend who has one"?

Aimee, Gmail cannot force you to get a mobile phone. I've never had one, and I just skip over that bit of nonsense. They just want more ways to track you and give you advertising.

It's infuriating how many companies now just assume everybody has a cell phone - including the phone company when they want to come and hook up the phone. Hello - if I had a cell phone, why would I need a landline?

 

[Maniacal]

The landline is for people and companies you don't want calling your cell.

Not really worth the extra ~$20 a month since even the door pager/buzzer things for apartments will call cell phones (pretty hilarious since the building I used to live in was very slow to remove people from its list, so we could buzz/call a co-worker who hadn't lived in there for a year and had moved away from it, and she could let people in).

 

[uppi]

Install an email client like Thunderbird on your PC. That way you don't need to log in to the gmail web interface and won't get any nagging about your mobile phone number. And you get an offline copy of your emails.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Actually I've been using Thunderbird. I use it when I'm using Firefox's private browsing mode and for backup reasons (actually, I installed it to export some emails to HTML)