My business Workspace account got suspended recently, no reason given, canât even login to contact support. Iâm a solo user so I only had one admin account and that was the one locked out. There was just one text field to submit an appeal, so I did. I never got any email confirmation or tracking number for my appeal, itâs been a week now with no contact from Google. This happened about a week after they charged my credit card for the subscription.
Iâm now in the process of switching to Fastmail. Google doesnât give a shit about anything besides for their golden goose, I would encourage everyone to move away from their services before they just screw you with no warning or recourse just because they can.
I ditched Google Workspace for Proton earlier this year and haven't looked back. Yes, the Proton apps don't integrate with everything and E2E encrypted data isn't as accessible as the data held in Google apps, but that's a bonus at this point.
I learned recently that there is controversy around Proton and (surprisingly to me) far-right. Previous HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446899
Some people understand that there is naunce in the world. This is literally just the view of a single sponsor.
The way everyone gets so up-in-arms about the political views of a person three levels detached from the company is insane.
"Oh no, an individual with different views than me offhandedly mentioned Proton, the horror! I can't possibly differentiate between the views of a company and a separate individual!
Let's go grandstand about canceling our service and discouraging others from signing up because a random person thinks differently than me, and talked about the company."
Iâm also worried that this is just the future of SaaS where everything is a Kafkaesque nightmare of automated processes no one even understands anymore, and even these incidents are lost in so much complexity the businesses either donât care or donât even know itâs happening.
That's pretty much the way the work did now if you're dealing with the "right" companies. The future isn't evenly distributed.
Dispute the credit card charge and you might be able to get in touch with someone.
I switched over to Zoho, has a lot of the same tools (mail/users/office) but UI is much more tech-y / old-school it e.g. more dense. Gets to the point.
I also use it with my own domain registered outside Zoho, so Zoho cannot actually lock me out of my email ever, only the data they host, though this is true for external domains in Google Workspace also.
I get this sort of thing constantly because my domain, 3e.org, which I have had for 30 years, is apparently impossible. It's either too short to be real, or starts with a number (obviously impossible).
And like the author, 90% of the time I can just disable their front-end validation and go on my merry way.
Super cool website btw.. cheers!
My friend has a short last name, and they still have many websites be like "must be longer then 3 letter"
Has your friend tried clearing their cookies?
Smells like âproduct engineeringâ. So a product or an engineering lead gets a task to reduce risks of specific abuse by preventing someone from sending email from yahoo or web.de clone. As a quick solution they add this filter without âoverthinkingâ it. The impact is low, a few customers in a million, so its stupidity gets unnoticed and, once first complaint reaches them, quietly deprioritized to death. Removing it is cheap: the justification for taking that work is likely the show stopper. Google is an old large corp that hires and fires at a scale. Owning removal of abuse filter to increase revenue by Planck-sized amount is an impossible thing.
> Just for context, this is a premium domain with a very high premium renewal fee, no history of abuse obviously.
The registry premium domains on the new TLDs have several issues. The biggest IMO is a lack of price protection. Non-premium domains at least get the cohort based protection from section 2.10c of the registry agreement.
So, in addition to being treated as a 2nd rate domain, thereâs nothing stopping the registry from cranking up the price if a domain gets popular. I donât think itâs ever happened, but have never found contractual terms that forbid it.
I made a website about it a while ago after a registry reclassified one of my domains from standard to premium.
Do you have a list of TLDs that donât charge for premium domains? E.g. I have never seen a Registry Premium .com domain.
The end is really hilarious. Google had a stupid frontend-only validation, it seems.
Since Google themselves claim that's a security check, there's a bug bounty here.
The author of that article missed their chance making Google eat their words.
I was under the impression Google engineers went through a rigorous hiring process, yet this is the sort of thing you get from lowest bidder consultants who have inexperienced devs.
Nah Google and Microsoft have been offshoring to India for years. And sorry, but the developers there suck.
All that leetcode, whiteboarding, and Googly-style interview questions just to put front-end validation for security.
I use a .one for a project where it makes perfect sense. Brevo, who are a huge email delivery platform, told me they don't support signing up with a .one domain. Fortunately, after a couple of weeks going back-and-forth one of their developers eventually saw sense and fixed it.
Sadly, with Google, I don't think you'll ever get the issue that far up the chain.
I've got a .email domain which various UK based retailers insist isn't a real domain from which email can be sent. I've been trying to convince Argos that it is real for about seven years.
To their credit, my building society actually took it all on board and fixed their system within a few months. To my incredible surprise, so did a major insurer.
Since the author asked about Alice: it was an Internet provider in France in the early 2000's.
Some domains in that list are truly ancient. That was a trip down memory lane.
Just wait for someone at Google to read this post and then block the domain retrospectively.
And ban their entire Google account
And delete all their data.
*make it hidden, they will of course keep the data for themselves :)
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