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Ask HN: (Solved) We are sorry, but you do not have access to Gmail

100 points by WelcomeShorty ↗ HN
RESOLVED! Thanks for all of you who pointed me to my glaring mistake to subscribe to the WRONG (read: essentials) version which provides NO email. Changed to "Workspace Business Starter" (with in intermediate step, check comments if you are stuck like me).

My vanity domain (¨Lastname¨.net) had its email hosted on gmail, for over 10 years with a lot of success.

Util I was forced to buy Workspace. Since that moment the message "We are sorry, but you do not have access to Gmail" shows with NO way to enable it.

I made the mistake of having this domain registration done with an email on this domain and have lost the password for the domain registar (NetSol).

So now I can not change the MX records (password reset only works with registered email) and I have try every single possibility to contact google: to no avail.

EVERYTHING I own (user accounts and the like) are now unavailable since I lost access to my email.

Is there any google whisperer who can help or tell me where I could find help?

I am desperate...

47 comments

[ 7.2 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] thread
jiripospisil
Does "https://accounts.google.com/addmailservice" do anything useful?
WelcomeShorty
IT lets me sign in to my account and pops ip the message "are sorry, but you do not have access to Gmail. Please log in to your Admin Console to enable Gmail. Learn more"

Ergo: no :(

WantonQuantum
Are you able to go to admin.google.com?
WelcomeShorty
Yes, and it tells me "go here and do that to enable gmail" which, surprise: DOES NOT.

Seems, as per other comments I need to upgrade my subscription. It that is all it takes I will go hide my head in shame...

danpalmer
And what does it say when you log in to the Admin Console?
WantonQuantum
Hopefully you can regain access to your domain through one of these options:

https://customerservice.networksolutions.com/prweb/PRAuth/ap...

WelcomeShorty
It does not, since I do not have the password of my account there and no way to reset it without access to the email of that account :(
WantonQuantum
Have you tried the “Primary Email Replacement”?
WelcomeShorty
Not yet because of the document requirements. Some make no sense to me (I live in Switzerland, there are documents required I do not even know what they mean.)

BUT, as others wrote, it seems I just need to upgrade my subscription!

jiripospisil
What kind of Workspace subscriptions do you have? This page [0] talks about "Essentials" editions which do not have Gmail available:

> With Essentials for your domain, you get many of the features of other editions of Google Workspace but without the cost of services you might not need, like Gmail

and if you want Gmail, you need to upgrade:

> If you need Gmail, sign up instead for Business Starter, Business Standard, and Business Plus.

[0] https://support.google.com/a/answer/7681288

WelcomeShorty
Google Workspace Essentials

> sign up instead for Business Starter, Business Standard, and Business Plus.

The options I see are called. Google Workspace Enterprise Plus. Google Workspace Enterprise Standard. Google Workspace Enterprise Essentials.

So much confusion :(

wccrawford
This is making me so glad I ditched them for my email hosting when they decided to charge, instead of just paying them.
WelcomeShorty
Trust me: I will be gone in under 10 seconds, as soon as I recover from this madness.
kybernetikos
I've not been disappointed to move my email to fastmail.

On the office apps though, I feel that despite the occasional burst of crazy (Why does the text colour button look like superscript in sheets if you have white selected?), google office apps tend to work relatively speedily and do collaboration really well, in constrast to the other behemoth you'd be likely to choose. I'd love to find an alternative with a similar level of polish, but I haven't yet.

mathieuh
I did the same, I was already paying for iCloud+ for other reasons so I just moved my domain to them. Only thing I miss is the automatic aliases, they're more complicated with iCloud.
ErikCorry
You accidentally signed up for Essentials, which has no email. This happened to me.

Since you are paying, you can contact support and actually get a human to help you.

When I got things sorted out my old mails were still there.

bartread
> Essentials, which has no email.

This is an incredibly helpful comment but I can't be the only person who finds the idea of such a service, branded "Essentials", that doesn't include email rather baffling.

ErikCorry
Yeah the new Ford "Essentials" has no wheels or engine, but otherwise it's a great car with a cool name.
unwind
As a non-business outsider it's even weirder than that, since Gmail is free for regular "consumer" use.

It's as if Ford gave away ad-plastered pedal cars for free, but if you pay them for a business car they give you a plain-painted (I just guess paid services are ad-free) car with no wheels or engine. Weird segmentation, and totally unexpected, I can easily understand how OP made this mistake.

nolok
Yes and no, it's not a google services essentials but a google workspace aka sheets/calc/drive, account.

You might think "but email are essentials for work" and I would agree if not for the fact that it's especially branded as a way to use google work tools without uprooting yourselves out of your own current email and force you to use google mail.

From the product page, second sentence: Create a Google Workspace account with your current work email address and start using the tools you know and love today with your team. And at the top are the google logo of the services covered, and while google current logos sucks you can't mistake gmail redish blob.

I'm not saying this is great, or that you should have paid more attention or anything like that, but that such an offer actually makes sense, even though

1 - it suffers from google branding issue where people see "google" not "workspace" because they change it every couple weeks anyway

2 - it should check if you already have an active gmail on that account and let you know you're probably doing something you don't want to

eduction
> Create a Google Workspace account with your current work email address

I think you’ve just shown us why Google is at fault here rather than OP: OP’s current email address was at Google.

The sentence is inaccurate in such situations.

(And before anyone says I’m being pedantic, consider that we were fully ready to be pedantic in the other direction, in Google’s favor.)

mcv
> it's especially branded as a way to use google work tools without uprooting yourselves out of your own current email and force you to use google mail.

But their current email was GMail, and now they're uprooted from that.

cube00
That's because email is open and we can't have that in the Google walled garden, but if you insist you can pay extra for the privilege.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
WelcomeShorty
OMG that's it?

So would "Google Workspace Enterprise Essentials" do the trick? I am unsure since it contains the word Essentials.

WelcomeShorty
So I switched to "Google Workspace Enterprise Essentials" costs 10 / account / month. Result: NO email.

Then I had the option to switch to different subscriptions that are called Workspace Business, in different versions. Changed to "Workspace Business Starter" costs 6 / account / month. Result: EMAIL WORKS

Incredible lousy customer experience. Will move everything away to other service provider. Google, it was great sailing but this... was the straw.

code51
> Since you are paying, you can contact support and actually get a human to help you.

Wow, a rare offering from Google.

WelcomeShorty
ErikCorry, I can not "DM" you, but there are no words that let me express my gratitude.

May the karma you have earned with this, grant you the good fortune you deserve.

zerr
Why paying by personal data doesn't qualify for a human support?
paranoidrobot
admin.google.com is the dashboard for Google Workspace.

So long as you can still sign into your Workspace's Administrative Google Account you should be able to go to Licences and update the licence configuration there.

habibur
> have lost the password for the domain registar (NetSol)

You need to recover your domain register's password first.

You can't just leave it there like this for long anyway. Your CC will expire within a few years, and domain will not renew without intervention.

Once you do it. The other problems will solve too.

outsomnia
You're right, but the fastest way to do that is regain his email and do the lost password flow.

It sounds from other posts changing his gmail away from "essentials" will let him solve that and then his domain.

mmcgaha
I have not used network solutions in around ten years but I did like their customer service. They were a high touch company with empowered customer service reps. They will be really helpful getting the password changed.
mpeg
This happened to me too, and I also had no idea how to fix it – if you can figure it out let me know as I've ended up migrating to another email provider but would rather use gmail to keep all my accounts together
WelcomeShorty
"Just" upgrade to "Workspace Business Starter" and Bob's your uncle!

GL

pierreminik
I’ve had to do help a client in a similar position. We got contact with the domain registrar’s phone support, took over an hour, “proved” we were the legitimate owner of the domain with credit card details along with other personal information the registrar knew but was not public. They changed the recovery email of the domain account temporarily so we could login and get control back.
INTPenis
This sort of happened to me. At some point waaaay back I was clicking around gmail and figured out how to create a custom domain. But for some reason I didn't do it for myself, I did it for my mom. So for over a decade my mom had her own custom domain on gmail.

And by this point I don't even remember how I did that. But now Google emails me saying I can't do that unless I pay them, I need to have some sort of payment info or they'll close the account.

Fine, I migrated her over to proton quickly, helped her set it up and done. They just did the final close of the old account recently. They gave me plenty of time and warnings to solve this. Unfortunately whenever I tried to login with what I thought was the admin account, gmail just said it wasn't the admin account. So I really had no chance to investigate further.

mensetmanusman
My friend had a heart attack and logged into his google account from a hospital laptop. After that, google banned his gmail and he lost access forever.

Now he uses proton mail.

analog31
As an interesting aside, this is why human IT workers have not been replaced by robots. A rule of systems engineering is that sufficiently complex systems operate in failure mode 100% of the time, meaning that some of the controls have to be bypassed manually. You still need humans to keep a system like Google, or payroll, or whatever, working.
nottorp
Funny that the OP considered all kinds of solutions except asking Google Support. They have trained their customers well.
WelcomeShorty
Oh trust me: I did. Entered all in different chat windows, forms etc.

I guess you know what the result was, since I came here (and got the solution in minutes!).

nottorp
I did take a look at the various google workspace flavors. Understood nothing.

Does Azure make more sense?