(Not verified) Interesting and terrifying experience of someone with Google

M

mk76

Skilled
Just came across this thread


TLDR; Company uses Google accounts that are all connected. I ****ed up and abused a policy that turns out results in a complete ban/block on the Google account, and ALL associated accounts. Everyone in my company is now blocked by Google and some of their personal e-mails are also blocked as well. Google isn't helping us out since their policy is final and will not share any information regarding the problem, but we hope to get in contact with someone who can fix this for us.
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I find it hard to believe, specially with a giant like Google, that there is no quick way to reach them in case of such catastrophe. Imagine the loss at the user(business/company) end.

If however this is true as mentioned, I see this as a strong wake-up call.
 
mk76 said:
Just came across this thread




I find it hard to believe, specially with a giant like Google, that there is no quick way to reach them in case of such catastrophe. Imagine the loss at the user(business/company) end.

If however this is true as mentioned, I see this as a strong wake-up call.
Click to expand...
You can reach google through their customer support if you pay or thorough support forums. But yes, the way they work is very shady. You dont get answers or what specifically caused the termination. Also while using Google apps, if you have a doc that contains something they have explicitly banned, it will be inaccessible. Its really weird how it works.
 
mk76 said:
Just came across this thread




I find it hard to believe, specially with a giant like Google, that there is no quick way to reach them in case of such catastrophe. Imagine the loss at the user(business/company) end.

If however this is true as mentioned, I see this as a strong wake-up call.
Click to expand...

Having access to GSuite and managing several accounts and domains, this sounds highly dubious.

Secondly, what he did was stupid. Really stupid.
 
vivek.krishnan said:
Having access to GSuite and managing several accounts and domains, this sounds highly dubious.
Secondly, what he did was stupid. Really stupid.
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Well no doubt about that. He's an idiot to do that. But the repurcussion - banning the entire org, thereafter cascading the ban to linked personal accounts .. kind of hard to believe. But scary, if true

Party Monger said:
You can reach google through their customer support if you pay or thorough support forums. But yes, the way they work is very shady. You dont get answers or what specifically caused the termination. Also while using Google apps, if you have a doc that contains something they have explicitly banned, it will be inaccessible. Its really weird how it works.
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For personal accounts using free service it's ok, but for business accounts such an experience is nightmare. Wonder how's O365 experience.[DOUBLEPOST=1526902069][/DOUBLEPOST]
Gearbox said:
Isnt this related to zero tolerance policy in most companies, which may lead to even termination?
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Some of the comments did mention this. Looks like their gsuite admins did not put in sufficient control.
 
vivek.krishnan said:
Having access to GSuite and managing several accounts and domains, this sounds highly dubious.

Secondly, what he did was stupid. Really stupid.
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Why does it sound dubious? People have several domains and often need gsuite on all of them. I have 3 domains on it myself. Nothing shady about it. Have a domain, want an email, simple.

What he did was stupid, so thats a total of 1 justified bans out of the whole 200 accounts + personal accounts. Its retarded on Google's part. They will resolve this, obviously, but by that time all their goodwill would be gone. I was literally considering getting 10 gsuite accounts but not if I'm going to be held hostage using my own data, cause some rando in my office did something stupid.
 
mk76 said:
Well no doubt about that. He's an idiot to do that. But the repurcussion - banning the entire org, thereafter cascading the ban to linked personal accounts .. kind of hard to believe. But scary, if true



For personal accounts using free service it's ok, but for business accounts such an experience is nightmare. Wonder how's O365 experience.[DOUBLEPOST=1526902069][/DOUBLEPOST]
Some of the comments did mention this. Looks like their gsuite admins did not put in sufficient control.
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Hard to believe - that is exactly what I meant by dubious. I myself had to contact GSuite twice - once for a reseller issue and other for a TXT record issue. In both cases, quickly got to them easily, within a couple of minutes.

O365, I am pretty sure it is going to be a licensing nightmare.
 
Seems hard to believe! I've had multiple experiences with google customer service and never had any issues. Things are always sorted in 3-5 mins.
 
Chaos said:
Seems hard to believe! I've had multiple experiences with google customer service and never had any issues. Things are always sorted in 3-5 mins.
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That is if you have a working account to begin with. In this case they were kicked off. Any contact gets you "You violated terms and conditions. I dont have for info"
 
mk76 said:
:) And that's Google. Together they make almost all of market share.

Perhaps one should get a rack and start setting up own servers. Even that's not easy due to security issues and regular maintenance.
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Well, yes.

As for the DIY, you can. Some years back, when we were using US based server, there was a major issue causing downtime of nearly 24 hours. In such times, we setup our own server on an alternative domain and ran it for nearly 7 days. Even now, its not that difficult. You just need to be good.

And who says you need to look at Google or MS only? We have others as well - from major hosting providers, to data centre operators and then dedicated email vendors like Zoho. We used Zoho and found them to be quite good.
 
vivek.krishnan said:
We used Zoho and found them to be quite good.
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Did you switch over or are still using Zoho? If yes, what were the reasons - features, safety ???

What do you suggest for personal needs - email hosting for a family group with provisions like family sharing (contacts, calendar etc)?

Our family group has personal domains per member (to set up mail like contact@<pers_name>.com). Didn't knew of Zoho then so went with separate Gsuite accounts.
Intent is
  • To get away from public emails which are too much of ads/spam now and to prevent any sudden closure of business resulting in loss of emails
  • To be able to store local backup ( pst or ???? )
  • Due to above, easily able to switch email hosts as per need
Still trying to figure out what is best in such situations.
 
mk76 said:
Did you switch over or are still using Zoho? If yes, what were the reasons - features, safety ???

What do you suggest for personal needs - email hosting for a family group with provisions like family sharing (contacts, calendar etc)?

Our family group has personal domains per member (to set up mail like contact@<pers_name>.com). Didn't knew of Zoho then so went with separate Gsuite accounts.
Intent is
  • To get away from public emails which are too much of ads/spam now and to prevent any sudden closure of business resulting in loss of emails
  • To be able to store local backup ( pst or ???? )
  • Due to above, easily able to switch email hosts as per need
Still trying to figure out what is best in such situations.
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We are no longer using Zoho, moving to GSuite this year. The reason for using Zoho was the alternative to our (at that time) existing email provider. Google was not considered at that time due to cost.

Do you want to host it yourself or with a third party? Zoho allows upto 10-15 users free, you could use that. I would still suggest Google, and setup a Linux box to do imap/pop sync in case of loss of account (although I find it very highly unlikely)

Also, why would you setup that type of personal domains, instead, I would suggest to setup a single mail server, with alternative domains. Make everyone part of one domain. They can send from a different ID if needed.

Switching email hosts is not that easy as you might assume, but with some DNS tricks it can be done. Just ensure your account to handle the DNS is different from the account which is itself hosted which you might lose access to.
 
Party Monger said:
You can reach google through their customer support if you pay or thorough support forums. But yes, the way they work is very shady. You dont get answers or what specifically caused the termination. Also while using Google apps, if you have a doc that contains something they have explicitly banned, it will be inaccessible. Its really weird how it works.
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If they tell what caused the termination, people will try to avoid using that next time they're trying to mess around security
 
vivek.krishnan said:
I would still suggest Google, and setup a Linux box to do imap/pop sync in case of loss of account (although I find it very highly unlikely)
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Any other effective ways to sync data? There are two types of data -
1) Email
2) Google docs.

CAn you sync 1 with another @gmail account? So that incase of a problem and till you find a solution, you can have the emails at hand with the same google search effectiveness.

Any ideas about 2? One idea is a script that dumps all docs once a day on a linux box..Any other leads[DOUBLEPOST=1527022053][/DOUBLEPOST]
adventureguy said:
If they tell what caused the termination, people will try to avoid using that next time they're trying to mess around security
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That's a very opaque approach. For a company that cant speak a sentence without mentioning AI twice, thats pretty odd.
 
Party Monger said:
That's a very opaque approach. For a company that cant speak a sentence without mentioning AI twice, thats pretty odd.
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I mean this is how it is. Even ethical hackers first report any exploits found to company and give them certain time (like 90days) and then make the flaw public so that companies have time to develop a fix for the flaw before the flaw is revealed
 
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