Yeah thats one way to address the issue (or even using multiple emails), but you know what's even better than that?

Having competent customer support, that would be able to address situations like this. Esp. with the amount of people that are using these home automation services with "cloud" support, its only going to get worse the more integrated these services become.

My friend has had a similar situation with the good ol Yahoo eMail service, and after being on call waiting for 4hours, they told him they cannot help him, then hung up.

I also had a similar service, with my STEAM account, I emailed Valve, and within 45 min the account was restored.

Lol, I was 1/2 way through this email thinking I'd respond that the only one worse is valve... turnabout. I've never had them respond to me. I've got several tickets multi months outstanding.

It is possible they queue their client service based on how much money each client has spent. It is what I would do if I did not have time to get to everyone cost effectively.

Yep. I've spent ~1k dollars on steam and i've gotten games refunded within days, even though they dont have to according to their TOS.

Wait, you actually had Valve do customer support? I think that's rarer than getting Google customer support, to be honest.

What are more companies like Valve? Seriously...

Use the cryptography based 2FA (with Google Authenticator on your phone). SMS is too open to social engineering, and as a second factor might actually make your account less safe.

Think I read that Google Auth falls back to SMS, so that wouldn't help.

you can freely choose between enabled authentication methods.

so, its possible to disable the sms authentication by removing it in the security settings

Do you know any good alternative? I was thinking about self hosting and just use google as a relay.

fastmail.fm is where people disillusioned with GMail traditionally go.

Have you heard any story similar to what's happening with OP where fastmail support ended up resolving the issue quickly and in a timely manner?

I'm not trying to imply that it would be the same, genuinely curious if I can expect better by switching.

Not that I'm aware of. I think there's an element of "grass is always greener on the other side." When the NSA thing first came out, people were publicly talking about leaving for GMail for Fastmail, since Google showed up in the XKeyscore docs, just as people felt superior about their Androids when the Apple Foxconn scandal broken. But in all likelihood they suffer from many of the same problems; Fastmail (and the various Android manufacturers) are just smaller and don't attract the same negative attention.

I haven't had my account hijacked before with fastmail. But I have had to contact support and I was in touch with a real person in less than 30 minutes.

I have dealt with Fastmail support in the past, although it was regarding invoicing questions, not identity fraud. My experiences were fairly positive.

can't say enough good things about fastmail