Google Workspace thinks my domain is an email provider (2025)

My business Workspace account got suspended recently, no reason given, can’t even login to contact support. I’m 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, it’s been a week now with no contact from Google. This happened about a week after they charged my credit card for the subscription.

I’m now in the process of switching to Fastmail. Google doesn’t 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 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.

Smells like „product engineering“. 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 „overthinking“ 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.

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.

The end is really hilarious. Google had a stupid frontend-only validation, it seems.

> 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, there’s nothing stopping the registry from cranking up the price if a domain gets popular. I don’t think it’s 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.

https://tldrisk.com/beyond-basics/premium-domains/

Just wait for someone at Google to read this post and then block the domain retrospectively.

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.

I think ditching google would've been a better choice.

the last paragraph was probably most important one here, and the lesson is If you truly want to enforce a validation then it has to be in the backend, the client side validation is just additional luxury if you can afford it.

On a different note, the validations were added for genuine reasons and most likely there would be some discussions/debate on the scope/cost/benefits. I would imagine if some one were to do it a a business seriously then they would have some way to override it on use case basis.

This was a fun read. Absolutely baffling behaviour from Google.

Crazy that .one gets locked, but .arpa is fully okay.

If you could just change your company's domain name that'd be swell!

Surprising Google is happy to lose a paying company over this.

Although the author is taking quite the risk bypassing Google's validation like that. Not sure I'd be risking my company's workspace to do it in case Google wakes up ban hammer happy one morning.

alice.it is indeed an email provider's domain; based on the code snippet it seems like they are active in other countries.

alice.app however isn't registered anywhere.

I would hope that somewhere at Google there is a policy that says you can't do anti-fraud and security checks in frontend only...

that's a trip. nice catch!

The engineer that implemented this probably used it to justify promotion.

"Reduced fraudulent signups by <made up metric>. Reduce business risk exposure."

Google engineering has certainly taken a nosedive.

ooof that's bad, all levels of support missed the frontend validation and blamed you and an opaque non-existent process instead

I wonder how this list ended up being created anyway. Was it a long standing issue, or just some ai slop? web.com, web.org, web.net don't look like an email provider.