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Ask HN: Locked out of Google Aps email with no recourse - advice?

9 points by labaraka ↗ HN
I've been locked out of my Google Apps email for over 24 hrs due to "suspicious activity". I am the admin of the domain so "contacting my admin" is of no help. Filled Contact Us form and spoke to customer support lady who is unfortunately clueless and cannot help me at all.

Terrible experience for such a mission-critical service.

Anyone has suggestions on how to deal with this to restore access?

PS: I did not sent out any spam or do anything that goes against their ToS. Just a loyal customer for 7 years doing normal day to day emailing.

12 comments

[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 41.6 ms ] thread
akg_67
Email is a critical communication channel. Don't put up with this sort of crap from any company. If you control your domain and have capability to modify records. Buy mail service from another provider and redirect MX record to new service. And if you can estimate approximate value lost due to this action and you are in U.S., send a bill to Google, file a small court claim against Google if unpaid for 30 days.
labaraka
I totally agree with you for the medium term. My challenge right now is that I don't have access to the DNS records and migrating to a new email service will take days/weeks.
akg_67
Migrating to new email service doesn't take days/weeks, at best a few hours as long as you were prepared with existing email aliases (catch all can help minimize the missing aliases) and configuration and access.

In the short term, you are at the mercy of Google. Next time you want to avoid similar fiasco, when you purchase any service from a vendor, please consider the whole offering from sales to support. If you don't see a quick resolution pathway for situations when shit hits the fan, walk away from those vendors.

Personally, I have never bought or recommended others to purchase any "paid" services from Google. They are incapable of and not setup for providing enterprise level product, service and support.

labaraka
Which email provider do you recommend? I am ready to switch after another full day of BS from their support staff.
Lan
How long it takes to switch services depends on how long you have your TTL set on your MX records. If he set it to expire after days or weeks, it would take days or weeks to switch services. Usually the default is a much lower value, but there are some legitimate reasons to want a high TTL (It could help mitigate a domain hijacking for example).
suyash
Were you on the free or the paid plan? I am guessing if you were on the paid plan, you would have more recourse?
labaraka
Unfortunately it's the same deal for free and paid.
suyash
You didn't answer the question.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
skurry
Probably not what you want to hear, but I'd avoid Google for any mission critical things, and any business model that relies on Google products for revenue (YouTube, AdMob, AdSense). Their automated "fraud detection" algorithms frequently have false positives and ban innocent users, without chance to appeal and have recourse. Terrible customer service.