[redacted], it looks like this issue resolved itself; I'm curious, did you mention your email address anywhere on this page? I didn't see it mentioned.
I'm happy to ask people for more details. Normally when you have two-factor authentication on, I wouldn't expect you to see this message. So there might be some improvements we need to make on our side to try to prevent this from happening for other people.
Matt, I think your message is consistent with the disconnect people feel when experiencing problems with Google services.
The root of the issue for the consumer of Google services is not a loss of email access (that's just the sort of technical problem everyone has when dealing with the internet). The issue is that there is no person representing Google who says, "I'm sorry you are experiencing difficulty, let me see what I can do to help you."
There is a meaningful number of posts for the exact issue the OP experienced and what little assistance that Googlers provide is generally of the "you did something wrong" variety rather than "we're working on making it better."
brudgers, I think the larger mission for Google has to be to drive down the number of people having problems like this. So Google's philosophy (for better or worse) is often to find and fix the root causes of problems. So for an account that was hijacked, we'd prefer to put our resources into finding new ways to prevent and protect against hijacked accounts, rather than putting a ton of people into one-on-one sessions to work with people whose accounts are hijacked. For one thing, the scale of Gmail makes those sort of one-on-one consultations extremely difficult.
Imagine if tens of thousands of accounts are hijacked every day. There's not an easy way to interact with all those people, which is why we look for ways to drive down the number of hijacks or provide additional solutions like two-factor authentication or other self-service solutions.
In this case, there was a subtle point that I was trying to make, which is that the problem resolved itself even though the original poster never appeared to give his email address. Sometimes these issues are a matter of transient issues like connectivity or data centers where it's just a matter of time for the issue to fix itself.
It's a problem of pitch. You're entirely correct that the original poster's technical issue may have been resolved automatically, but it's not the technical issue which prompted the post. Accounts don't need reassurance, but people do - particularly when they have placed trust in Google regarding something which may be critical to their business or social life.
When my credit card is compromised, just by acknowledging my inconvenience, it makes the time between the cancellation of one card and the arrival of its replacement seem reasonable.
I get the issue of scale. What I don't get is why Liza isn't wired up to the forum and the email doesn't say "We apologize for the inconvenience." It's only a handful of bytes.
I'm happy to ask people for more details. Normally when you have two-factor authentication on, I wouldn't expect you to see this message. So there might be some improvements we need to make on our side to try to prevent this from happening for other people.